Don Winslow - Dawn Patrol

But like ain't is.

Is is is.

Johnny Banzai finds a shaken Teddy D-Cup drinking an “organic martini” in the Lotus Cottage.

“Where's Tammy Roddick?” Johnny asks him.

Teddy points his thumb in the general direction of the beach.

From whence comes an explosion and a ball of flame.

Hang Twelve runs.

Pushing off on all twelve toes, he hoofs it as hard as he can toward Sunny's house. Like he's trying to pump the fear through his bloodstream and out of his body.

It ain't working.

Hang is terrified.

Word traveled down to Pacific Beach with the speed of rumor itself. The Boonemobile went off the bluff at Sea Cliff Park and burst into flames. Boone Daniels hasn't been found. The firemen are there now. There's already talk of a paddle-out and a memorial service after the big swell is over.

Hang doesn't know what to do with his fear, so he takes it to Sunny.

You gotta understand where he's coming from.

Where he came from.

Father a tweeker, mother a drunk, Brian Brousseau's home life, if you want to call it that, was a bad dream during a nightmare. Brian got about as much care and attention as the cat, and you don't want to see the cat. He was about eight when he started picking up the leftover roaches lying around the crappy little house.

Brian liked the feeling he got from smoking the roaches. It eased his fear, muffled the fights between his mom and dad, helped him get to sleep. By the time he was in junior high, he was toking up every day, before and after school. When school was finally over, he'd wander down to the beach, smoke up, and watch the surfers. One day, he was sitting in the sand, just toasted, when this surfer came out of the water, walked up to him, and said, “I see you here every day, grom.”

Brian said, “Uh-huh.”

“How come you just watch?” Boone asked. “How come you don't surf?”

“Don't know how,” Brian said. “Don't have a board.”

Boone nodded, thought about it a second, looked down at the skinny little kid, and said, “You want to learn? I'll show you.”

Brian wasn't so sure. “You a fag, man?”

“You want to ride or not, dude?”

Brian wanted.

Scared as shit, but he wanted.

“I can't swim,” he said.

“Then don't fall off,” Boone said. He looked down at Brian's feet. “Dude. Do you have six toes?”

“Twelve.”

Boone chuckled. “That's your new name, gremmie-‘Hang Twelve.’”

“Okay.”

“Stand with your feet about shoulder width,” Boone said.

Hang got up. Boone shoved him in the chest. Hang stepped back with his right foot to keep his balance. “What-”

“You're a goofy-foot,” Boone said. “Left-footed. Lie down on the board.”

Hang did.

“On your stomach, ” Boone said. “Jesus.”

Hang turned over.

“Now, jump up on your knees,” Boone said. “Good. Now into a squat. Good. Now stand.”

Boone made him do it twenty times. By the time Hang finished, he was sweating and breathing hard-it was the most exercise he'd done maybe in his life-but he was totally into it. “This is fun, dude!”

“It's even more fun in the water,” Boone said. He led Hang out to where some small waves were coming in shallow, had him lie down on the board, and pushed him into a wave. Hang rode it in like a boogie board.

Insta-love.

Hang kept Boone out there all frigging afternoon, until the sun set and after. On his third ride, he tried to stand. He fell off on that wave and the next thirty-seven. The sun was a bright orange ball on the horizon when Hang stood up on the board and rode it all the way to shore.

First thing he'd ever achieved.

The next day was Saturday, and Hang was out there first thing in the morning, standing on the beach and staring out at The Dawn Patrol.

“Who's the grem?” Dave asked from the lineup.

“A stoner kid,” Boone said. “I dunno, he looked lost, so I took him out.”

“A stray puppy?” Sunny said.

“I guess,” Boone said. “He took to it, though.”

“Grems are a pain in the ass,” Dave warned.

“We were all grems once,” Sunny said.

“Not me,” Dave said. “I was born cool.”

Anyway, it was tacit permission to go bring the kid in. Boone got off the board on his next ride and went up to Hang. “You wanna surf?”

Hang nodded.

“Yeah, okay,” Boone said. “I have an old stick in my quiver over there. It's a piece of shit, a log basically, but it will ride. Get it out, wax it; then I'll show you how to paddle out. You stay close to me, out of other people's way, try not to be a total kook, okay?”

“Okay.”

Hang waxed the board, paddled out, and got in everyone's way. But that's what grems do-it's their job. The Dawn Patrol ran interference for him, both with the ocean and the other surfers. No one messed with the kid because it was clear that he was under The Dawn Patrol's collective wing.

Hang took the board home that night.

Leaned it against the wall next to his bed.

Hang might have been invisible at home, he might have been a nothing at school, but now he had an identity.

He was surfer.

He was Dawn Patrol.

Now he runs toward Sunny's house, gets to her door, and pounds on it. A few minutes later, a sleepy Sunny comes to the door.

“Hang, what-”

“It's Boone.”

He tells her about Boone.

Cheerful sits at the hovel that is Boone's desk, trying to balance the books.

Boone Daniels is a perpetual pain in the ass. Immature, irresponsible, a hopeless businessman.

But what were you, Cheerful asks himself, before Boone came into your life?

A lonely old man.

Boone once saved him several million dollars in alimony when the businessman uncharacteristically fell head over heels in love with a twenty-five-year-old Hooters waitress, for whom he bought a new rack and fuller lips to heighten her low self-esteem. Her self-image lifted, she promptly felt herself attractive enough to screw a twenty-five-year-old wannabe rock star and begin a television career that she intended to finance with California community property.

Boone felt bad for the lovesick old guy and took the case, took the pix, made the video, and never showed either of them to Cheerful. He did show them to the soon-to-be ex-Mrs. Cheerful and told her to take her big tits, full lips, guitar-stroking boyfriend, and a $100K alimony settlement, get out of San Dog, and leave Cheerful the hell alone.

“Why should I?” she asked.

“Because he's a nice old man and you fucked him over.”

“He got his money's worth,” she said. Then she looked at him with an expression of lust she no doubt learned from porn videos and asked, “You want proof?”

“Look,” Boone replied, “you're hotter than hell, and I'm sure you're the whole barrel of monkeys in bed, but, one, I like your husband; two, I'd cut my junk off with a jagged, shit-encrusted tin can lid before I'd ever stick it anywhere near you; and three, I'll not only take your home movies and photo album into court, but I'll put them on the Net, and then we'll see what that does for your television career.”

She took the walk-away deal.

And made it big on TV playing the second lead, the sassy best friend, on a sitcom that's been draining viewer IQs for years.

“What do I owe you?” Cheerful asked him afterward.

“Just my hourly.”

“But that's a few hundred,” Cheerful said. “You saved me millions. You should take a percentage. I'm offering.”

“Just my hourly,” Boone said. “That was the deal.”

Cheerful decided that Boone Daniels was a man of honor but a crap businessman, and therefore he made it his hobby to try to get Boone on some sort of sound financial footing, which is something like trying to balance a three-legged elephant on a greased golf ball, but Cheerful persists anyway.