Don Winslow: Dawn Patrol

“I'm not an arson investigator,” Boone says. “I can put you in touch with-”

“Mr. Silver was having a relationship with one of his dancers,” Petra continues. “One Ms. Tamara Roddick.”

“A strip club owner banging one of his dancers,” Boone says. “Just when you think you've seen it all…”

“Recently,” Petra says, “Mr. Silver broke off the relationship and suggested that Ms. Roddick find employment elsewhere.”

“Let me finish this for you,” Boone says. “The spurned young lady, in a sudden attack of conscience, decided that she couldn't live with the guilt anymore and came forward to the insurance company to confess that she saw Silver burn his building down.”

“Something like that, yes.”

“And you bought this shit?” Boone asks.

Alan Burke is way too smart to put this Tammy babe on the stand, Boone thinks. The opposing lawyer would shred her, and the rest of Burke's case with her.

“She passed a polygraph with flying colors,” Petra says.

“Oh,” Boone says. It's the best he can think of.

“So what's the problem?” he asks.

“The problem,” Petra says, “is that Ms. Roddick is scheduled to testify tomorrow.”

“Does she surf?” Boone asks.

“Not to my knowledge.”

“Then there's no problem.”

“When I tried to contact her yesterday,” Petra says, “to make arrangements for her testimony-and to bring her some court-appropriate clothes I bought for her-she didn't respond.”

“A flaky stripper,” Boone says. “Again, brave new world.”

“We've made repeated attempts to contact her,” Petra says. “She neither answers her phone nor returns messages. I rang her current employer, Totally Nude Girls. The manager informed me that she hasn't shown up for work for three days.”

“Have you checked the morgue?” Boone asks.

Five million dollars is a lot of money.

“Of course.”

“So she's taken off,” Boone says.

“You have a keen grasp of the obvious, Mr. Daniels,” Petra says. “Therefore, you should have no trouble discerning what it is that we require of you.”

“You want me to find her.”

“Full marks. Well done.”

“I'll get right on it,” Boone says. “As soon as the swell is over.”

“I'm afraid that won't do.”

“Nothing to be afraid of,” Boone says. “It's just that this.. ”

“Tamara.”

“… Tammy babe could be anywhere by now,” Boone says. “It's at least an even bet that she's at a spa in Cabo with Dan Silver. Wherever she is or isn't, it's going to take a while to find her, so whether I start today, or tomorrow, or the day after, it really doesn't matter.”

“It does to me,” Petra says. “And to Mr. Burke.”

Boone says, “Maybe you didn't understand me when I was talking about the big-”

“I did,” Petra says. “Something is in the process of ‘swelling,’ and certain people with sophomoric sobriquets are, for reasons that evade my comprehension, ‘stoked’ about it.”

Boone stares at her.

Finally he says, as if to a small child, “Well, Pete, let me put it to you in a way you can understand: Some very big waves-the sort of waves that come only about once every other presidential administration-are about to hit that beach out there, for one day only, so all I'm going to be doing for those twenty-four hours is clocking in the green room. Now go back and tell Alan that as soon as the swell passes, I'll find his witness.”

“The world,” Petra says, “doesn't come to a screeching halt on account of ‘big waves’!”

“Yes,” Boone says, “ it does.”

He disappears into the bathroom, shutting the door behind him. The next sound is that of running water. Cheerful looks at Petra and shrugs, as if to say, What are you going to do?

Petra walks in to the bathroom, reaches into the shower, and turns on the cold water.

“Naked here!” Boone yells.

“Sorry-didn't notice.”

He reaches up and turns off the water. “That was a sketchy thing to do.”

“Whatever that means.”

Boone starts to reach for a towel but then gets stubborn and just stands there, naked and dripping wet, as Petra looks him straight in the eyes and informs him, “Mr. Daniels, I intend to make partner within the next three years, and I am not going to achieve that goal by failing to deliver.”

“Petra, huh?” Boone says. He finds a tube of Headhunter and rubs it over his body as he says, “Okay-your dad was Pete and he wanted a boy child, but that didn't work out, so he glossed you Petra. You figured out pretty young that the best way to earn Daddy's affection was to add a little testosterone to the mix by growing up to be a hard-charging lawyer, which sort of accounts for that log on your shoulder but not the analretentiveness. No, that would be the fact that it's still the law firm of Burke, Spitz and Culver, not Burke, Spitz, Culver and Hall.”

Petra doesn't blink.

Actually, Daniels's shot in the dark isn't far off. She is an only child, and her British father, a prominent barrister, had wanted a son. So, growing up in London, she had kicked a football around the garden with her dad, attended Spurs matches, and accompanied him to British Grand Prix at Silverstone.

And perhaps becoming a lawyer was yet more of an effort to earn her father's approval, but doing it in California had been her American mother's idea. “If you pursue your career in England,” her mother said, “you will always be Simon Hall's daughter to everybody, including yourself.”

So Petra took a first at Somerville College in Oxford, but then had crossed the water to Stanford for law school. Burke's talent spotters had plucked her easily from the crowd and made her an offer to come to San Diego.

“Your off-the-cuff psychoanalysis,” she says with a smile, “is all the more amusing coming from a man whose parents named him Daniels, Boone.”

“They liked the TV show,” Boone says. It's a lie. Actually, it was Dave the Love God who, back in junior high, gave him the “Boone” tag, but Boone is not about to reveal this-or his real first name-to this pain in the butt.

“And what are you putting on your body?” she asks.

“Rash guard.”

“Oh, dear.”

“Ever had wet suit rash?” Boone asks.

“Nor a rash of any other kind.”

“Well, you don't want it,” Boone says.

“I'm sure. Towel?”

Boone takes the towel, wraps it around his waist, and shuffles out into the office.

“What's the state of the nation?” Boone asks Cheerful.

Cheerful punches a few more numbers into the adding machine, looks at the result, and says, “You can either eat or pay rent, but not both.”

This is not an unusual short list of options for Boone. His perpetually shallow cash flow isn't because Boone is a bad private investigator. The truth is, he's a very good private investigator; it's just that he'd rather surf. He's totally up front about the fact that he works just enough to get by.

Or not, because he is now three months late on the rent and would be facing eviction if not for the fact that Cheerful is not only his business manager but also his landlord. Cheerful owns the building, Pacific Surf, and about a dozen other rental properties in Pacific Beach.

Cheerful is, in fact, a millionaire several times over, but it doesn't make him any more cheerful, especially not with tenants like Boone. He's taken on the redemption of Boone's business affairs as a quixotic challenge to his own managerial skills, sort of Edmund Hillary trying to summit a mountain of debt, fiscal irresponsibility, unpaid bills, unfiled taxes, unwritten invoices, and uncashed checks.