Don Winslow - Dawn Patrol

Dave's out one day showing a young lifeguard some of the finer points. They're on those lifeguard boards, bright red longboards the size of small boats, paddling south, cutting across the long bend of coast from La Jolla Shores to La Jolla Cove, and suddenly the young lifeguard sits upright on his board and looks deathly pale.

Dave looks down and sees blood flowing into the water from his boy's right leg and then he sees why. A great white, cruising the cove for its favorite dish, has mistaken the rookie's black wet-suited leg for a seal and taken a chunk out of it. Now the shark is circling back to finish the meal.

Dave paddles between them-and you get this story from the rookie, not from Dave-sits up, kicks the shark in the snout and says, “Get out of here.”

Kicks it again and repeats, “I said get your skanky shark ass out of here.”

And the shark does.

It does a dorsal flip and scoots.

Then Dave cuts the leash off his board, ties it off as a tourniquet for the newbie's leg, and tows him to shore. Gets him into an ambulance, announces he's hungry, and walks over to La Playa for a burger at Jeff's Burger.

That's Dave.

(“You know what I did after I had that burger?” Dave told Boone privately. “I went to the can by tower thirty-eight and threw it all up. I was that scared, man.”)

Lifeguard candidates go to great lengths either to get into Dave's training classes or to dodge them. The ones who aspire to be great want him as their instructor; the ones who just want to get by avoid him like wet-suit rash.

Because Dave is brutal.

He tries to wash them out, doing everything this side of legal to expose their weaknesses-physical, mental, or emotional.

“If they're going to fail,” he said one day to Boone as they watched one of his classes do underwater sit-ups in the break, “I want it to be now, not when some poor kook who's about to drown needs them to succeed.”

That's the thing: It doesn't matter if there's twenty people taken out by the undertow or blood in the water and sharks circling; a lifeguard has to arrive in the middle of that chaos as cool as a March morning and ask in a mellow tone if people would like to work their way to shore now, but there's, like, no rush.

Because the thing that kills most people in the water is panic.

They brain-lock and do stupid things-try to fight the tide, or swim in exactly the wrong direction, or start flapping their arms and wearing themselves out. If they'd just chill out and lie back, or tread water, and wait for the cavalry to arrive, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, they'd be okay. But they panic and start to hyperventilate and then it's over-unless that calm, cool lifeguard is out there to bring them back.

This is why Dave keeps trying to recruit Boone.

He knows that BD would make a great lifeguard. Boone's a natural waterman with genius-level ocean smarts, an indefatigable swimmer, his body ripped from daily surfing. And as for cool, well, Boone is the walking definition of cool.

The panic gene just skipped Boone.

And it's not just speculation on Dave's part. Boone was out there that day the riptide took all those people. Just happened to be there shooting the shit with Dave and deliberately swam out into a riptide and paddled around, calming the terrified tourists, propping up the ones who were about to go under, and smiling and laughing like he was in a warm wading pool.

And Dave will never forget what he heard Boone saying to the people as the lifeguard and his crew were desperately struggling to save lives: “Hey, no worries! We've got the best people in the world out here to bring us in!”

“What brings you to my realm?” Dave asks him now.

“Business.”

“Anytime you're ready to sign on the dotted,” Dave says, “I have a gig for you. You could be wearing a pair of these way-cool Day-Glo orange trunks inside a month.”

It's a joke between them-why lifeguard trunks, life jackets, and even life rafts are manufactured in the exact color that research has shown is most tantalizing to sharks. Day-Glo orange is just catnip to a great white.

“You have an encyclopedic knowledge of local strippers,” Boone says.

“And a lot of people think that's easy,” Dave says. “They don't realize the long hours, the dedication-”

“The sacrifices you make.”

“The sacrifices,” Dave agrees.

“But I do.”

“And I appreciate that, BD,” Dave says. “How can I be of service to you?”

Boone's not sure he can, but he's hoping he can, because the dead woman at the pool had that stereotypical teased-out stripper hair, and a stripper body. And it's been Boone's experience that strippers have stripper friends. This is because of the odd hours, and also because women who aren't strippers usually don't want to have friends who are because they're afraid the dancers will steal their boyfriends.

So he's playing the odds that say the Jane Doe is a stripper.

“I need to ID a dancer,” Boone says. “Redhead, an off-the-rack rack, an angel tattoo on her left wrist.”

“Gimme putt,” Dave says. “Angela Hart.”

“Angel Heart?”

“A nom de strip,” Dave says. “What about her?”

“She a… uh, friend of yours?”

“A gentleman doesn't tell, BD,” says Dave. “But that's a serious tone you've adopted. What's underneath it?”

“She's dead.”

Dave stares out over the ocean. The waves are starting to get bigger, and choppy, and the color of the water is a dark gray.

“Dead how?” Dave asks.

“Maybe suicide.”

Dave shakes his head. “Not Angela. She was a force of nature.”

“She ever work at Silver Dan's?”

“Didn't they all?”

“Was she friends with a girl named Tammy?”

“They were tight,” Dave says. “What's she got to do with this?”

“I don't know yet.”

Dave nods.

He and Boone sit and look at the water together. Boone doesn't rush things. He knows his friend is working through it. And the ocean never gets boring-it's always the same and always different.

Then Dave says, “Angela was pure nectar. You need any help finding out who killed her, you give me a shout.”

“No worries.”

Dave's back on the 'nocs, scoping the Flatland Barbies back to their hotel room.

Boone knows that he's looking but he isn't, you know.

Boone doesn't get far from the lifeguard tower.

He's on the boardwalk, heading back toward his ride, when who should he see, on a kid's dirt bike with tires thicker than a Kansas prom queen, than Red Eddie.

Red Eddie is a Harvard-educated, Hawaiian-Japanese-Chinese-Portuguese-Anglo-Californian with traffic-cone red hair. Yeah, yeah, yeah-traffic cones aren't red, they're orange, and Eddie's first name isn't Eddie, it's Julius. But there isn't a soul on this earth who has the stones to call the dude “Orange Julius.”

Not Boone, not Dave the Love God, not Johnny Banzai, not even High Tide, because Red Eddie is usually surrounded by at least a six-pack of super size Hawaiian moke guys and Eddie don't think nothing about letting the dogs out.

Red Eddie deals pakololo.

His old man, who owned a few dozen grocery stores in Oahu, Kauai, and the Big Island, sent Eddie from the north shore of Oahu to Harvard and then to Wharton Business School, and Eddie returned to the island with a sound business plan. It was Eddie who put the Wowie in Maui, the high in hydro. He brings massive amounts of the stuff in by boat. They drop it offshore in watertight plastic wrap, and Eddie's guys go out at night in Zodiacs, the small double-pontoon motorboats, and bring it in.

“I'm a missionary,” Eddie said to Boone one night at The Sundowner. “Remember how missionaries sailed from America to Hawaii to spread the good word and totally fuck up the culture? I'm returning the favor. Except my good news is benevolent and your culture needs fucking up.”