Don Winslow - Dawn Patrol

When Boone would call for backup, the other cops would be a little slow in responding; when he went into the locker room, no one spoke to him and backs were turned; when he'd go to leave, he'd pick up mumbled comments-“weak unit,” “child killer,” “traitor.”

He had one friend on the force-Johnny Banzai.

“You shouldn't be seen with me,” Boone told him one day. “I'm poison.”

“Knock off the self-pity,” Johnny told him.

“Seriously,” Boone said. “They won't like you being friends with me.”

“I don't give a shit what they like,” Johnny said. “My friends are my friends.”

And that was that.

One day, Boone was leaving the locker room when he heard a cop named Kocera mutter, “Fucking pussy.”

Boone came back in, grabbed him, and put his brother cop into a wall. Punches were thrown, and Boone ended up with a month's unpaid suspension and mandatory appointments with a department counselor who talked to him about anger management.

The subject of Rain Sweeny didn't come up.

Boone spent most of the month on Sunny's couch.

He'd get up by eleven in the morning, drain a couple of beers, and lie there watching television, looking out the window, or just sleeping. It drove Sunny nuts. This was a Boone she'd never seen-passive, morose, angry.

One day when she gently suggested that he might want to go out for a surf session, he replied, “Don't handle me, okay, Sunny? I don't need handling. ”

“I wasn't handling you.”

“Fuck.”

He got up off the couch and went back to bed.

She was hoping things would get better when he went back to work.

They didn't. They got worse.

The department took him off the street altogether and put him behind a desk, filing arrest reports. It was a prescription to drive an active, outdoor man crazy, and it did the trick. Eight to five, five days a week, he sat alone in a cubicle, entering data. He'd come home bored, edgy, and angry.

He was miserable.

“Quit,” Dave the Love God told him.

“I'm not a quitter,” Boone replied.

But three months into this bullshit, he did quit. Pulled his papers, turned in his badge and gun, and walked away. No one tried to talk him out of it. The only word he heard was from Harrington, who literally opened the door for him on the way out.

The word was “Good.”

Two hours later, Boone was back on Sunny's couch.

Surfing was out. Boone went AWOL from The Dawn Patrol. He never showed up anymore. He didn't go out at all.

One night, Sunny came home from a long shift at The Sundowner, found him stretched out on the sofa in the sweatpants and T-shirt that he'd had on for a week, and said, “We have to talk about this.”

“Which really means you have to talk about this.”

“You're clinically depressed.”

“‘Clinically depressed’?” Boone asked. “You're a shrink now?”

“I talked to one.”

“Fuck, Sunny.”

It got him off the couch anyway. He went out to her little porch and plopped down on one of the folding beach chairs. She followed him out there.

“I know you're angry,” she said. “I don't blame you.”

“I do.”

“What?”

“I do,” Boone repeated, staring out toward the ocean. She could see tears running down his face as he said, “I should have done what Harrington said. I should have helped him hold that guy under the water… beat him… hurt him… whatever it took to make him give up what he did with Rain Sweeny. I was wrong, and that girl is dead because of me.”

Sunny thought that this was a cathartic moment, that he'd start to heal after this, that things would get better.

She was wrong.

He just sank deeper into his depression, slowly drowning in his guilt and shame.

Johnny Banzai tried to talk to him. Came over one day and said, “You know that girl was almost certainly dead before you picked up Rasmussen. All the data show that-”

“Sunny ask you to come over?”

“What difference-”

“Fuck your ‘data,’ Johnny. Fuck you.”

The whole Dawn Patrol tried to work him out of it. No good. Even Red Eddie came by.

“I have all my people out,” Eddie said, “looking for your girl, looking for that sick bastard. If he raises his head anywhere, Boone, I'll have him.”

“Thanks, Eddie,”

“Anything for you, bruddah, ” Eddie said. “Anything in this world.”

But it didn't happen. Even Eddie's soldiers couldn't find Russ Rasmussen, couldn't find Rain Sweeny. And Boone sank deeper and deeper into his depression.

A month later, Sunny gave him an ultimatum. “I can't live like this,” she said. “I can't live with you like this. Either you go get some help or…”

“Or what? Come on, say it, Sunny.”

“Or find another place to live.”

He took the “or.”

She knew he would.

You don't give a guy like Boone an ultimatum and expect any other result. The truth was, she was relieved to see him go. She was ashamed of it, but she was glad to be alone in her place. Alone was better.

Better for him, too.

He knew that he was just taking her down with him.

If you're going to sink, he told himself, at least have the decency to sink alone. Go down with your own ship.

Alone.

So he left the police force, he left Sunny, he left his friends, The Dawn Patrol, and he left surfing.

Never turn your back on the ocean.

You may think you can walk away from it, but you can't. The pull of the tide brings you back; the water in your blood yearns for its home-coming. And one morning, after two more months of lying around his apartment, Boone picked up his board and paddled out alone. He didn't think about it, had no intention of going out that morning; he just went.

The ocean healed him-slowly and not completely, but it healed him. He went out in the roughest, baddest surf he could find; he wandered from break to break like Odysseus trying to navigate his way home. At Tourmaline, Rockslide, Black's, D Street, Swami's, Boone sought the pounding he felt that he deserved, and the ocean gave it to him.

It beat him, battered him, scrubbed his skin with salt and sand. He'd trudge home exhausted and sleep the sleep of the dead. Get up with the sun and do it again. And again and again, until one morning he reappeared at The Dawn Patrol.

It was nothing dramatic-there was no moment of decision-it was just that he was there in the lineup when the rest of them paddled out. Johnny, High Tide, Dave, and Sunny. Nobody said anything to him about it; they just picked up where they'd left off, as if he'd never been gone.

On the beach at the end of that session, Johnny asked him, “What are you going to do now?”

“You're looking at it.”

“Just surf?”

Boone shrugged.

“Did you win the lottery?” Johnny asked. “You need to make a living, don't you?”

“Yeah.”

Dave offered to get Boone on as a lifeguard. He'd need to take a couple of courses, Dave said, but it should only take about six months. Boone declined; he figured he wasn't that good at guarding people's lives.

It was Johnny's idea for Boone to get his PI's license.

“All kinds of work for ex-cops,” Johnny said. “Insurance investigations, security, bond jumpers, matrimonial stuff.”

Boone went with it.

He wasn't thrilled about it, but that was the point. He didn't want a job that he loved. You love something, it hurts when you lose it.

Which is what worried Sunny. To the rest of his world, Boone was back, same as he ever was-laid-back, joking, refining the List of Things That Are Good, grilling fish on the beach at night, making supper for his friends, wrapping everything in a tortilla. Among The Dawn Patrol, Sunny was the only one who knew that Boone wasn't back, not fully. She suspected that he now inhabited a world of diminished expectations, both of himself and of other people, of life itself. That Boone only wanted to work enough to support his surfing jones might have seemed hip, but she understood it as the disappointment that it was.