Don Winslow - Dawn Patrol

Boone watched as Hang's face turned a little green and beads of sweat popped out on his forehead. Hang shifted in his chair; he reached down and touched his toes. He took deep breaths-at Johnny's suggestion, based on two trips to the labor room with his wife-he panted like a dog. At one point, he let out an enormous belch…

“No vomit, no vomit,” High Tide quickly said as several of the official judges looked closely at the front of Hang'sJERRY GARCIA IS GOD T-shirt.

Hang managed to, well, hang.

The crowd counted down the entire last minute. It was a triumph, a ticker-tape parade, New Year's Eve in Times Square with Dick Clark as half of the onlookers counted the numbers and the other half chanted, “Hang Twelve, Hang Twelve, Hang Twelve…”

Hang's face shone with victory.

Never before in his life had he been the object of this much attention; he had never won anything, certainly never won a lot of money for himself or other people. He had never been the hero, and now he was. He was glowing, accepting the pats on the back, the congratulations, and the shouts of “Speech, speech, speech.”

Hang smiled modestly, opened his mouth to speak, and spewed trajectory vomit all over the innocent bystanders.

Johnny won his initial bet, plus the fifty on the cheese.

It was the only even semi — fun time that Boone had ever spent in a strip club.

But if Tammy were a nurse, he thinks, we'd be going to the hospital; if she were a secretary, we'd be going to an office building. But she's a stripper, so…

“You don't have to come,” he tells Petra, praying she'll take him up on the bailout offer.

“No, I want to.”

“Really, it's pretty sleazy,” Boone says, “especially in the daytime.”

If a strip club at night is tedious, in the daytime it's the birth of the blues-third-string strippers grinding halfhearted “dances” to a mostly empty room scarcely populated with lonely alcoholics coming off graveyard shifts, or horny losers figuring (wrongly) they have a shot with the C-team girls.

It's horrible, and, annoyed as he is with Petra's type A bullshit, he still wants to spare her the full hideousness.

She's having none of it.

“I'm going with you,” she insists.

“There won't be any male strippers,” he says.

“I know,” she says. “I still want to go.”

“Oh.”

“What do you mean, ‘Oh’?” she asks.

“Look,” Boone says, “there's nothing wrong with it. Personally, I think that-”

Petra's eyes widen.

Totally striking. Amazing.

“Oh, ‘Oh,’” she says. “I understand. Just because I'm immune to your Neanderthal anticharm, you jump to the conclusion that I therefore just have to be-”

“You're the one who wants to go to a-”

“On business!”

“I don't know why you're getting so worked up,” Boone says. “I thought you were this politically correct-”

“I am.”

“Look, around here it's all good,” Boone says. “I'll bet half the women I know… well, not half, okay, a tenth anyway… of the women I know play for the other-”

“I do not play for…” Petra says. “It's none of your business whom I play for.”

“For whom I play,” Boone says, correcting her. “Dangling… uh

…”

“Preposition,” she says.

Otherwise, she doesn't talk to him the whole way to the strip club.

Which makes him wish he'd thought up the lesbian thing a lot sooner.

Petra's quiet for the whole drive.

Which is a relatively long one, because the club, TNG, is all the way up in Mira Mesa, in North County.

Boone takes the 8 east, then turns north on the 163, through the broad flatland of strip malls, fast-food joints, and wholesale outlets. He turns onto Aero Drive, just south of the Marine Corps air-training base, and pulls into the parking lot of TNG.

TNG is the name of the club, and the stripper cognoscenti know that the initials stand for “Totally nude girls”-as opposed, Boone thinks as he parks the van, to partially nude girls, or sort-of nude girls. No, the owners of TNG wanted to make sure that prospective customers knew that the girls were completely, absolutely, totally nude.

“It's not too late for you to wait in the van,” he tells Petra.

“And potentially miss meeting my Alice B. Toklas?” she asks as she gets out. “No way.”

“Is she a friend of Tammy's or something?” Boone asks.

“Never mind.”

They go in.

All strip clubs are the same.

You can dress them up all you want, create any dumb gimmick you can think of, go for the down-low sleazy or the “gentlemen's club” faux sophistication, but at the end of the day it all amounts to a girl on a stage with a pole.

Or, in this case, one totally nude girl on a pole and another totally nude girl unenthusiastically writhing on the stage without the benefit of a pole.

TNG has no pretense at sophistication. TNG is a bare-bones, stripped-down (as it were) stroke joint (same) where guys come to look at naked women, maybe get a lap dance, or, if they're feeling fat, go with a dancer behind a beaded curtain into the VIP Room to get a “deluxe lap dance.”

The club is pretty empty at this time of the day. This is a working guy's hang, and most of the working guys are working. Two marines, judging by their haircuts, sit on stools at the stage-side bar. A depressed-looking salesman type, playing hooky from his calls, sits alone, one hand on a dollar bill, the other on his lap. Other than that, it's just the bartender, the bouncer, and a totally nude waitress serving her apprenticeship on the floor before she can make the giant leap to the stage.

The bouncer makes Boone right away.

Boone sees the flicker of recognition, and then he sees the guy move away a little bit and make a cell phone call. So we're working on a clock, Boone thinks as he steers Petra away from the stage-side stool and into a booth along the back wall.

The waitress comes over and stands expectantly.

“What would you like?” Boone asks Petra.

“A wet wipe?” she asks.

“I meant like a drink.”

“Yes, hemlock with an arsenic twist, please.”

“The lady will have a ginger ale,” Boone says, “and I'll have a Coke.”

The waitress nods and walks away.

Petra looks at the stage.

“I thought you said this was a strip club,” she says.

“I did. It is.”

“But don't you have to have some clothing on,” she asks, “in order to strip it off?”

“I guess so.”

“But they're already nude.”

“Totally.”

“So they just stand there,” Petra says, “and sort of dance, and that's all they do?”

No, that's not all they do, Boone thinks. But he really doesn't want to get into that, and he's relieved when the waitress comes with their drinks. Petra reaches into her bag, comes out with a linen handkerchief, with which she carefully wipes the rim of her glass, then uses the handkerchief to hold the glass.

Well, we all have our own brand of paranoia, Boone thinks. Hers is catching a venereal disease from a glass; mine is getting knocked into tomorrow by a date-rape drug that the bouncer told the bartender to slip into my drink. Except the purpose wouldn't be to take sexual advantage of me; it would be to drag me out in the alley and beat me half to death.

Because clearly the bouncer got a “Be on the lookout for Boone Daniels” notice and he's called Dan Silver to get his instructions.

That's the bad news.

The good news is, if they're protecting something here, it means that there's something to protect.

He thinks about sharing that gem with Petra, then thinks better of it.

Anyway, she's staring at the girls on the stage.