The Dawn Patrol, Page 3

  He disappears back up the stairs with a single word, “Follow.”

  Petra goes up the stairs, where Cheerful—a tall man, probably six-six, very thin, wearing a red plaid shirt tucked into khaki trousers—is already hunched over a desk. Well, she takes it on faith that it’s a desk because she can’t actually see the surface underneath the clutter of papers, coffee cups, ball hats, taco wrappers, newspapers, and magazines. But the saturnine man is punching buttons on an old-fashioned adding machine, so she decides that it is, indeed, a desk.

  The “office,” if you can grace it with that name, is a mess, a hovel, a bedlam, except for the back wall, which is neat and ordered. Several black wet suits hang neatly from a steel coatrack, and a variety of surfboards lean against the wall, sorted and ordered by size and shape.

  “Forty-some years ago,” Cheerful says, “a bra was something I tried with trembling fingers and little success to unsnap. Now I find that I am a brah. Such are the insults of aging. What can I do for you?”

  “Would you be Mr. Daniels?” Petra asks.

  “I would be Sean Connery,” Cheerful replies, “but he’s already taken. So is Boone, but I wouldn’t be him even if I could.”

  “Do you know when Mr. Daniels will be in?”

  “No. Do you?”

  Petra shakes her head. “Which is why I asked.”

  Cheerful looks up from his calculations. This girl doesn’t take any crap. Cheerful likes that, so he says, “Let me explain something to you: Boone doesn’t wear a watch; he wears a sundial.”

  “I take it Mr. Daniels is somewhat laid-back?”

  “If Boone was any more laid-back,” Cheerful says, “he’d be horizontal.”

  8

  Boone walks up Garnet Avenue from the beach in the company of Sunny.

  Nothing unusual about that—they’ve been in and out of each other’s company for coming on ten years.

  Sunny originally flashed onto The Dawn Patrol like daytime lightning. Paddled out, took her place in the lineup like she’d been born there. Boone was about to launch into a six-foot right break when Sunny jumped in and took it from him. Boone was still poised on the lip when this blond image zipped past him as if he were a buoy.

  Dave laughed. “Man, that babe just ripped your heart out and fed it to you.”

  Boone wasn’t so freaking amused. He caught the next wave in and found her coming back out through the white water.

  “Yo, Blondie,” Boone said. “You jumped my wave.”

  “My name isn’t ‘Blondie,’ ” Sunny said. “And when did you buy the beach?”

  “I was lined up.”

  “You were late.”

  “My ass I was.”

  “Your ass was late,” Sunny said. “What’s the matter, the big man can’t take getting beat by a girl?”

  “I can take it,” Boone said. Even to himself, it sounded lame.

  “Apparently not,” Sunny said.

  Boone took a closer look at her. “Do I know you?”

  “I don’t know,” Sunny said. “Do you?”

  She lay out on her board and started to paddle back out. Boone had no choice but to follow. Catching up with her wasn’t easy.

  “You go to Pac High?” Boone asked when he got alongside.

  “Used to,” Sunny said. “I’m at SDSU now.”

  “I went to Pac High,” Boone said.

  “I know.”

  “You do?”

  “I remember you,” Sunny said.

  “Uh, I guess I don’t remember you.”

  “I know.”

  She kicked it up and paddled away from him. Then she spent the rest of the session kicking his ass. She took over the water like she owned it, which she did, that afternoon.

  “She’s a specimen,” Dave said as he and Boone watched her from the lineup.

  “Eyes off,” Boone said. “She’s mine.”

  “If she’ll have you.” Dave snorted.

  Turned out she would. She outsurfed him until the sun went down, then waited for him on the beach until he dragged his ass in.

  “I could get used to this,” Boone said to her.

  “Get used to what?”

  “Getting beat by a girl.”

  “My name’s Sunny Day,” she said ruefully.

  “I’m not laughing,” he said. “Mine’s Boone Daniels.”

  They went to dinner and then they went to bed. It was natural, inevitable—they both knew that neither one of them could swim out of that current. As if either one of them wanted to.

  After that, they were inseparable.

  “You and Boone should get married and produce offspring,” Johnny Banzai told them a few weeks later. “You owe it to the world of surfing.”

  Like, the child of Boone and Sunny would be some sort of mutant superfreak. But marriage?

  Not happening.

  “CCBHS” is how Sunny explained herself on this issue. “Classic California broken home syndrome. There ought to be a telethon.”

  Emily Wendelin’s hippie dad had left her hippie mom when Emily was three years old. Her mom never got over it, and neither did Emily, who learned not to give her heart to a man because men don’t stay.

  Emily’s mom retreated into herself, becoming “emotionally unavailable,” as the shrinks would say, and it was her grandmother—her mother’s mother—who really raised the girl. Eleanor Day imbued Emily with her strength, her grace, and her warmth, and it was Eleanor who gave the girl the nickname “Sunny,” because her granddaughter lit up her life. When Sunny turned eighteen, she changed her surname to Day, regardless of how pseudohippie it sounded.

  “I’m matrilineal,” she explained.

  It was her grandmother who persuaded her to go to college, and her grandmother who understood when, after the first year, Sunny decided that higher education, at least in a formal setting, wasn’t for her.

  “It’s my fault,” Eleanor had said.

  Her house was a block and a half from the beach, and Eleanor had taken her granddaughter there almost every day. When eight-year-old Sunny said that she wanted to surf, it was Eleanor who saw that a board was under the Christmas tree. It was Eleanor who stood on the beach while the girl rode wave after wave, Eleanor who smiled patiently when the sun went down and Emily would wave from the break, holding up one imploring finger, which meant “Please, Grandma, one more wave.” It was Eleanor who went to the early tournaments, who sat calmly in the ER with the girl, assuring her that the stitches in her chin wouldn’t leave a scar, and that if they did, it would be an interesting one.

  So when Sunny came to her and explained that she didn’t want to go to college, and tearfully apologized for letting her down, Eleanor said that it was her fault for introducing Emily to the ocean.

  “So what do you intend to do?” Eleanor asked.

  “I want to be a professional surfer.”

  Eleanor didn’t raise an eyebrow. Or laugh, or argue, or scoff. She simply said, “Well, be a great one.”

  Be a great surfer, not marry one.

  Not like the options were mutually exclusive, but neither Sunny nor Boone was interested in getting married, or even living together. Life was just fine the way it was—surfing, hanging out, making love, and surfing. It was all one and the same thing, one long, unbroken rhythm.

  Good days.

  Sunny waited tables in PB while she worked on her surfing career; Boone was happy being a cop, a uniformed patrolman with the SDPD.

  What busted it up was a girl named Rain Sweeny.

  Things changed after Rain Sweeny. After she was gone, Boone never really came back. It was like there was this distance between Boone and Sunny now, like a deep, slow current pulling them apart.

  And now this big swell is coming, and they both sense that it’s bringing a bigger change.

  They stand outside Boone’s office.

  “So … late,” Sunny says.

  “Late.”

  Walking away, Sunny wonders if it’s too late.

  L
ike she’s already lost something she didn’t even know she wanted.

  9

  Boone walks into Pacific Surf.

  Hang Twelve looks up from Grand Theft Auto 3 and says, “There’s an inland betty upstairs looking for you. And Cheerful’s way aggro.”

  “Cheerful’s always aggravated,” Boone replies. “That’s what makes him Cheerful. Who’s the woman?”

  “Dunno.” Hang Twelve shrugs. “But, Boone, she’s smokin’ hot.”

  Boone goes upstairs. The woman isn’t smokin’ hot; she’s smokin’ cold. But she is definitely smokin’.

  “Mr. Daniels?” Petra says.

  “Guilty.”

  She offers her hand, and Boone is about to shake it, when he realizes that she’s handing him her card.

  “Petra Hall,” she says. “From the law firm Burke, Spitz and Culver.”

  Boone knows the law firm of Burke, Spitz and Culver. They have an office in one of the glass castles in downtown San Diego and have sent him a lot of work over the past few years.

  And Alan Burke surfs.

  Not every day, but a lot of weekends, and sometimes Boone sees him out on the line during the Gentlemen’s Hour. So he knows Alan Burke, but he doesn’t know this small, beautiful woman with the midnight hair and the blue eyes.

  Or are they gray?

  “You must be new with the firm,” Boone says.

  Petra’s appalled as she watches Boone reach behind his back and pull the cord that’s connected to a zipper. The back of the wet suit opens, and then Boone gently peels the suit off his right arm, then his left, then rolls it down his chest. She starts to turn away as he rolls the suit down over his waist, and then she sees the flower pattern of his North Shore board trunks appear.

  She’s looking at a man who appears to be in his late twenties or early thirties, but it’s hard to tell because he has a somewhat boyish face, made all the more so by his slightly too long, unkempt, sun-streaked brown hair, which is either intentionally unstylishly long or has simply not been cut recently. He’s tall, just an inch or two shorter than the saturnine old man still banging away on the adding machine, and he has the wide shoulders and long arm muscles of a swimmer.

  Boone’s oblivious to her observation.

  He’s all about the swell.

  “There’s a swell rolling down from the Aleutians,” he says as he finishes rolling the wet suit over his ankles. “It’s going to hit sometime in the next two days and High Tide says it’s only going to last a few hours. Biggest swell of the last four years and maybe the next four. Humongous waves.”

  “Real BBM,” Hang Twelve says from the staircase.

  “Is anyone watching the store?” Cheerful asks.

  “There’s no one down there,” Hang Twelve says.

  “ ‘BBM’?” Petra asks.

  “Brown boardshorts material,” Hang Twelve says helpfully.

  “Lovely,” Petra says, wishing she hadn’t asked. “Thank you.”

  “Anyway,” Boone says as he steps into the small bathroom, turns on the shower, and carefully rinses not himself but the wet suit, “everyone’s going out. Johnny Banzai’s going to take a mental-health day, High Tide’s calling in sick, Dave the Love God’s on the beach anyway, and Sunny, well, you know Sunny’s going to be out. Everyone is stoked.”

  Petra delivers the bad news.

  She has work for him to do.

  “Our firm,” Petra says, “is defending Coastal Insurance Company in a suit against it by one Daniel Silvieri, aka Dan Silver, owner of a strip club called Silver Dan’s.”

  “Don’t know the place,” Boone says.

  “Yeah you do, Boone,” Hang Twelve says. “You and Dave took me there for my birthday.”

  “We took you to Chuck E. Cheese’s,” Boone snaps. “Back-paddle.”

  “Aren’t you going to introduce me?”

  It’s amazing, Boone thinks, how Hang Twelve can suddenly speak actual English when there’s an attractive woman involved. He says, “Petra Hall, Hang Twelve.”

  “Another nom de idiot?” Petra asks.

  “He has twelve toes,” Boone says.

  “He does not,” says Petra. Then she looks down at his sandals. “He has twelve toes.”

  “Six on each foot,” says Boone.

  “Gives me sick traction on the board,” Hang Twelve says.

  “The strip club is actually immaterial,” Petra says. “Mr. Silver also owns a number of warehouses up in Vista, one of which burned to the ground several months ago. The insurance company investigated and, from the physical evidence, deemed it arson and refused to pay. Mr. Silver is suing for damages and for bad faith. He wants five million dollars.”

  “I’m not an arson investigator,” Boone says. “I can put you in touch with—”

  “Mr. Silver was having a relationship with one of his dancers,” Petra continues. “One Ms. Tamara Roddick.”

  “A strip club owner banging one of his dancers,” Boone says. “Just when you think you’ve seen it all …”

  “Recently,” Petra says, “Mr. Silver broke off the relationship and suggested that Ms. Roddick find employment elsewhere.”

  “Let me finish this for you,” Boone says. “The spurned young lady, in a sudden attack of conscience, decided that she couldn’t live with the guilt anymore and came forward to the insurance company to confess that she saw Silver burn his building down.”

  “Something like that, yes.”

  “And you bought this shit?” Boone asks.

  Alan Burke is way too smart to put this Tammy babe on the stand, Boone thinks. The opposing lawyer would shred her, and the rest of Burke’s case with her.

  “She passed a polygraph with flying colors,” Petra says.

  “Oh,” Boone says. It’s the best he can think of.

  “So what’s the problem?” he asks.

  “The problem,” Petra says, “is that Ms. Roddick is scheduled to testify tomorrow.”

  “Does she surf?” Boone asks.

  “Not to my knowledge.”

  “Then there’s no problem.”

  “When I tried to contact her yesterday,” Petra says, “to make arrangements for her testimony—and to bring her some court-appropriate clothes I bought for her—she didn’t respond.”

  “A flaky stripper,” Boone says. “Again, brave new world.”

  “We’ve made repeated attempts to contact her,” Petra says. “She neither answers her phone nor returns messages. I rang her current employer, Totally Nude Girls. The manager informed me that she hasn’t shown up for work for three days.”

  “Have you checked the morgue?” Boone asks.

  Five million dollars is a lot of money.

  “Of course.”

  “So she’s taken off,” Boone says.

  “You have a keen grasp of the obvious, Mr. Daniels,” Petra says. “Therefore, you should have no trouble discerning what it is that we require of you.”

  “You want me to find her.”

  “Full marks. Well done.”

  “I’ll get right on it,” Boone says. “As soon as the swell is over.”

  “I’m afraid that won’t do.”

  “Nothing to be afraid of,” Boone says. “It’s just that this …”

  “Tamara.”

  “… Tammy babe could be anywhere by now,” Boone says. “It’s at least an even bet that she’s at a spa in Cabo with Dan Silver. Wherever she is or isn’t, it’s going to take a while to find her, so whether I start today, or tomorrow, or the day after, it really doesn’t matter.”

  “It does to me,” Petra says. “And to Mr. Burke.”

  Boone says, “Maybe you didn’t understand me when I was talking about the big—”

  “I did,” Petra says. “Something is in the process of ‘swelling,’ and certain people with sophomoric sobriquets are, for reasons that evade my comprehension, ‘stoked’ about it.”

  Boone stares at her.

  Finally he says, as if to a small child, “Well, Pete, let
me put it to you in a way you can understand: Some very big waves—the sort of waves that come only about once every other presidential administration—are about to hit that beach out there, for one day only, so all I’m going to be doing for those twenty-four hours is clocking in the green room. Now go back and tell Alan that as soon as the swell passes, I’ll find his witness.”

  “The world,” Petra says, “doesn’t come to a screeching halt on account of ‘big waves’!”

  “Yes,” Boone says, “it does.”

  He disappears into the bathroom, shutting the door behind him. The next sound is that of running water. Cheerful looks at Petra and shrugs, as if to say, What are you going to do?

  10

  Petra walks in to the bathroom, reaches into the shower, and turns on the cold water.

  “Naked here!” Boone yells.

  “Sorry—didn’t notice.”

  He reaches up and turns off the water. “That was a sketchy thing to do.”

  “Whatever that means.”

  Boone starts to reach for a towel but then gets stubborn and just stands there, naked and dripping wet, as Petra looks him straight in the eyes and informs him, “Mr. Daniels, I intend to make partner within the next three years, and I am not going to achieve that goal by failing to deliver.”

  “Petra, huh?” Boone says. He finds a tube of Headhunter and rubs it over his body as he says, “Okay—your dad was Pete and he wanted a boy child, but that didn’t work out, so he glossed you Petra. You figured out pretty young that the best way to earn Daddy’s affection was to add a little testosterone to the mix by growing up to be a hard-charging lawyer, which sort of accounts for that log on your shoulder but not the anal-retentiveness. No, that would be the fact that it’s still the law firm of Burke, Spitz and Culver, not Burke, Spitz, Culver and Hall.”

  Petra doesn’t blink.

  Actually, Daniels’s shot in the dark isn’t far off. She is an only child, and her British father, a prominent barrister, had wanted a son. So, growing up in London, she had kicked a football around the garden with her dad, attended Spurs matches, and accompanied him to British Grand Prix at Silverstone.