Dawn Patrol (26 page)

True, Boone thinks. And it doesn’t stop me wanting to keep you alive. Or is it that I just need to deliver you to the courtroom?

“Stay away from the windows,” Boone says. “Keep your head down. In fact, you might be better off in the bedroom.”

“You think you’re the first guy to tell me that?” she asks, eyes hard as emeralds.

“I’ll make you a deal,” Boone says. “I don’t judge you and you don’t judge you.”

“Easier said than done.”

“Yeah.”

She sneers. “What would you know about it, surfer dude?”

“You don’t have a monopoly on regrets, Tammy.”

Boone can feel the ocean swell, literally under his feet. The waves push against the pilings, wash through, and then pull on their way out. The big swell is coming, and when it goes out again, it will take with it the life he knew. He can feel it, and it scares the hell out of him. He wants to hold on, but he knows there’s no holding on against the sea.

When a tsunami comes in, it hits with incredibly destructive force, crushing lives and homes. But it’s almost worse when it recedes, dragging lives out into the endless sea that is the irredeemable past.

Petra gets out of the shower, then wanders into Boone’s bedroom, telling herself she’s going to catch a quick nap, but really to snoop.

No, not snoop, she thinks.

Simply to find out a little more about the man.

Like the rest of the place, the bedroom is neat and clean. Nothing remarkable about it, save for the fishing pole sticking out of the window, except …

Books.

Used paperbacks on a bedside table and in a small bookcase in the corner. Some stacked by the bed. And not just the sports books or crime novels that she might have expected if she thought that he actually read, but genuine literature—Dostoyevsky, Turgenev, Gorky. Over in the corner is a stack of—Can it be? she thinks—Trollope. Our oceangoing nature boy is a crypto–Phineas Finn?

She thinks of all the little jibes she’s given him all day about being an uneducated philistine, then thinks about the books that are stacked on her bedside table—trashy romance novels and bodice rippers that she doesn’t have to read anyway. And he’s been having me on all day, his private little joke.

Bastard.

She keeps snooping.

There’s a small desk in the corner, with a computer and terminal on it. Guiltily, she slides the desk drawer open and sees photographs of a little girl.

A darling, almost a stereotype of your classic California girl—blond hair, big blue eyes, a spray of freckles across her cheeks. She’s looking directly into the camera without a trace of self-consciousness. A happy little girl.

Petra picks up the photo and sees the little nameplate at the edge of the frame.

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.

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.

“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.

“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.

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.