Don Winslow - Dawn Patrol

Much of PB, especially inland from the beach, still has that blue-and-khaki-collar mentality-unlike its tonier neighbor to the north, La Jolla- and a fiercely egalitarian ethic that is a holdover from the close-living, pooled ration card, and backyard party days of the war. Notoriously casual, PB residents aren't at all bothered by the fact that two of their major streets are actually misspelled: Felspar should be Feldspar and Hornblend should be Hornblende, but nobody cares, if they even know. (So much for the San Diego College of Letters.) Nobody seems to know why the major east-west streets were named after precious stones in the first place, except that it seemed to be some kind of lame effort to suggest that PB was the gem of the West Coast. And you know a PB locie by the way he or she pronounces Garnet Avenue. If they say it correctly-“Garnet”- you know right away they're from out of town, because the locals all mispronounce it, saying “Garnette.”

Anyway, if you drive west on Garnet, however the hell you say it, you're going to run into Pickering's old Pleasure Pier, renamed Crystal Pier, another PB landmark revived by the PBY and B-24. The midway is gone, and so is the dance hall, replaced by the white cottages with blue shutters that line the north and south edges of the pier, then give way to empty space for fishermen who have been known to hook the occasional surfer trying to shoot the pilings.

But the concept of pleasure remains.

PB is the only beach in California where you can still drink on the sand. Between noon and eight p.m., you can slam booze on the beach, and for that reason PB had become Party Town, USA, Beach Division. The party is always on, at the beach, along the boardwalk, in the bars and clubs that line Garnet between Mission and Ingraham.

You've got Moondoggies, the PB Bar amp; Grill, the Tavern, the Typhoon Saloon, and of course, The Sundowner. On weekend nights-or any nights in the summer, spring, or fall-Garnet is rocking with a young crowd, many of them locals, a lot of them tourists who've heard about the party all the way from Germany, Italy, England, Ireland, Japan, and Australia. You've got a drunk and horny United Nations General Assembly down there, and the bartenders on Garnet have probably done more for world peace than any ambassador ever double-parked outside Tiffany's.

Yeah, except that something different has been creeping up the past few years as gangs from other parts of the city have been drawn to the PB nightlife, and fights have broken out in the clubs and on the street.

It's a shame, Boone thinks as he drives past the strip of nightclubs and bars, that the laid-back surfer atmosphere is giving way to alcohol- and gang-fueled rage, scuffles in bars that turn into fights in the streets outside.

It's weird-where you used to see signs that readNO SHIRT, NO SHOES, NO SERVICE and might just as well have added and no enforcement, now you see signs in the club doorways banning gang colors, hats, hooded sweatshirts, and any gang-related gear.

PB is getting a seedy, almost dangerous reputation, and the family tourist trade is starting to move to Mission Beach or up to Del Mar, leaving PB to the young and single, to the booze hounds and the gang bangers, and it's all too bad.

Boone has never much liked change anyway, certainly not this change. But PB has changed, even from the time Boone was growing up in it. He saw it explode in the Reagan eighties. A hundred years after its first real estate boom, Pacific Beach hit another one. But this time it wasn't lots of land for little one-story cottages; this time it was condo complexes and big hotels that bulldozed the little cottages into memories and robbed the few survivors of their sunlight and ocean views. And with the condos, the chain stores moved in, so a lot of Pacific Beach looks like a lot of everywhere else, and the small businesses that gave the place its charm-like The Sundowner and Koana's Coffee-are now exceptions.

And prices continued to rise, to the point where the average working person, the man or woman who built the town, can't even think about buying a place anywhere near the beach and will soon be priced out of the market entirely-threatening to turn the beachfront area into that weird dichotomy of a rich person's ghetto, where the rich lock themselves inside at night when the streets are taken over by drunk tourists and predatory gangs.

Now Boone drives east on Garnet, past all the clubs and bars and into the area of coffee shops, ethnic restaurants, tattoo parlors, palm-reading joints, used-clothing stores, and fast-food restaurants, then into the mostly residential neighborhood of the flats. He crosses the 5, where Garnet becomes Balboa Avenue, and pulls into the parking lot of Triple A Taxi.

Just around the corner from the old Consolidated Aircraft factory, where Reuben Fleet won the war and Pacific Beach got lost.

The taxi office is a small, formerly white clapboard building in need of a paint job. A metal security screen is open, revealing the company logo stenciled in fading red on the front window. Off to the left is a garage, where a taxi is up on a rack. Another half a dozen cabs are parked haphazardly around the parking lot.

“Wait in the van, okay?” Boone says as he turns off the engine.

“And flirt with hepatitis C for what reason?” Petra asks.

“Just stay in the van,” Boone says, “and try to look aggro.”

“‘Aggro’?”

“Aggravated,” Boone translates. “Angry, annoyed, pissed off.”

“That shouldn't be difficult,” she says.

“I didn't think so.” He takes his watch off and hands it to her. “Take this. Keep it in your lap.”

“You want me to time you?”

“Just do it. Please?”

She smiles. “Cheerful said you'd have a sundial.”

“Yeah, he's a hoot.”

Boone walks across the parking lot into the dispatch office. A young Ethiopian guy has the chair tipped back and his feet on the desk. Almost all the cab companies in San Diego are run by East African immigrants. Triple A Taxi is a strictly Ethiopian operation, Boone knows, while United Taxi is Eritrean. Sometimes they get into border skirmishes in the taxi line at the airport, but usually they get along okay.

“Can I help you?” the dispatcher asks as Boone walks in. He's a kid, barely out of his teens. Skinny, dressed in a ratty brown sweater over new 501 jeans that look freshly pressed. He doesn't take his Air Jordans off the desk. Boone isn't dressed so you'd have to take your feet off the desk for him.

“Dude,” Boone drawls, so it sounds more like “Duuuuuuude.” “I'm in trouble.”

“Breakdown?”

“Break up,” Boone replies. “See the chick in the van?”

The dispatcher swings his feet off the desk, brings the chair down on its wheels, adjusts his thick glasses on his nose, and looks out the window into the parking lot. He sees Petra sitting in the van's passenger seat.

“She's pissed off,” the dispatcher says.

“Way.”

“How come?”

Boone holds his left wrist out, showing white skin in the exact shape of a watch and band.

“Your watch is missing,” the dispatcher says.

Boone nods in Petra's direction. “She gave it to me for my birthday.”

“What happened to it?”

Boone sighs. “You keep a secret?”

“Yes.”

I hope not, Boone thinks, then says, “My boys and me partied last night? Some girls dropped in and I got a little friendly with one, maybe a little too friendly, you know what I'm saying, and I wake up and she's gone. Dude, with the watch.”

“You're fucked.”

“Totally,” Boone says. “So I told my girlfriend that it was my roommate Dave who was with the stripper but that he was in my room because Johnny was in his and I passed out by the pool, you know, but I'd left the watch in my room and the dancer, this Tammy chick, just, like, took it, you know, because she thought it was Dave's and she's pissed he called her a cab. So I was wondering maybe you could tell me where she went?”