Don Winslow - Dawn Patrol

The boat is going to be too heavy and sit too low in the water to be really safe, but there isn't really a choice. He either leaves them out here or he does his best to get them all in. He's not so worried about the open sea-the storm is calming down and he can negotiate the swells. The critical moment is going to be busting through the shore break, where the overloaded boat could easily flip or swamp. He doubts any of these kids are strong swimmers. If he doesn't bring the boat in upright, most of them will probably drown in the heavy white water that comes with the big swell.

Esteban hands the last girl down and then starts to climb in.

Dave stops him.

“You're not on the list, pacheco. ”

“What am I supposed to do?”

“Turn the boat around and take it back to Mexico,” Dave says. “What do you usually do?”

“I can't go back,” Esteban says.

“Why not?”

Esteban hesitates, then says, “I killed Juan Carlos. He was going to leave them out here.”

“Get in.”

Dave works his way to the aft of the boat.

There's no place for him to sit down, so he stands.

Boone pulls into Teddy's driveway and gets out of the car.

The night air is wet, somewhere between mist and gentle rain. The light coming from Teddy's living room window looks soft and warm.

Boone can see them through the window. Teddy's at the bar, fixing a stiff and dirty martini. Tammy paces the room. He tries to give her the drink, but she won't take it, so Teddy sips it himself.

He looks startled when Boone rings the doorbell.

Looks to Tammy, who looks back at him and shrugs.

Boone waits as Teddy opens the door a crack, the chain link left on. Boone shoves the pistol through the crack and says, “Hi. Can I come in?”

Yeah, he can.

A gun is its own invitation.

Teddy unhooks the chain lock and opens the door.

Boone goes in and kicks it shut behind him.

Teddy's house is as beautiful as he'd expected. Huge living room with a vaulted ceiling. Expensive custom paint with faux brush techniques. Expensive modern paintings and sculpture, a grand piano.

The center of the room is taken up with a floor-to-ceiling column that's a saltwater aquarium. A startlingly bright panoply of tropical fish circle serenely around the column. Tall green undersea plants stretch up toward the surface and wave like thin fingers in the mild, motor-driven current. At the back of the room, a slider gives a view of a huge spotlighted deck and, beyond that, the open ocean.

“Nice,” Boone says.

“Thanks.”

“Hi, Tammy.”

She glares at him. “What do you want?”

“Just the truth.”

“Trust me, you don't want it.”

“There's a little girl involved,” Boone says. “Now you're going to tell me the truth or, I swear, I'll splatter both of you all over this pretty room.”

Teddy walks back toward the bar. “Would you like a drink?” he asks. “You're going to need one.”

“Just the story, thanks.”

“Suit yourself,” Teddy says, “but I'm sitting down. It's been an exhausting couple of days, as you know.”

He sits down in the large leather easy chair and looks at the fish in his tank. “Tell him, Tammy. It's almost over now anyway.”

Tammy tells her story.

Tammy grew up in El Cajon, out in East County.

The usual stereotypical stripper back story: Her dad wasn't around a lot; her mom made an unsteady living as a waitress in a local restaurant and usually stayed for a few beers after her shift was over.

She was a lonely little girl. A latchkey kid who made herself instant macaroni and cheese, which she ate while watching celebrity shows on television and dreaming about becoming one of the actresses on the red carpet. It didn't seem likely then-she was skinny and gangly and had red hair, which the boys made fun of.

They stopped making jokes around the time she turned fourteen. Tammy didn't blossom-she exploded into a sexuality that seemed to happen overnight and was scary and confusing to her. Suddenly, boys wanted her, and she saw the way that grown men looked at her when she'd go to the restaurant to say hello to her mom. She wanted to say to them, I'm fourteen years old; I'm a kid. But she was afraid to speak to or even look back at them.

A good thing. Men would see the intensity in those incredible green eyes and mistake it for something else.

Okay, she learned to use it, she admits it freely. Why not? High school was a nightmare. She was never good at school-there were diagnoses of dyslexia and ADD-so being an actress wasn't going to happen. She couldn't read a script out loud and never got cast in the Drama Club productions. She thought about being a model, but you don't exactly bump into Eileen Ford in El Cajon, and she couldn't afford the money for photographers to create a portfolio. She did a little modeling for a local “sportswear” catalog and made a couple hundred dollars, but that was about it.

Tammy graduated from high school with a C-minus average, and it looked like waiting tables was her future. She did it for a year or so, enduring the crappy tips, the leers, the comments, and the offers, and then one day when she was twenty, she was walking home in the hundred-plus heat along the flat sunbaked sidewalk and decided that she had to do something, anything, to get out of there. So she took her red hair, amazing green eyes, and long legs, got on a bus to Mira Mesa, walked into a strip club, and auditioned.

She thought it would be hard, but it wasn't so hard, taking her clothes off. Okay, so it wasn't the red carpet; it was a platform and a pole. And yes, it was a clichй. But Tammy learned quickly that if she paused in her dance and cast those eyes out over the front row, she would get tips; if she picked out one guy and trained those cat eyes on him, she could easily get him into the Champagne Room, or the VIP Room, or whatever the hell room where the bigger money got made.

A year or so later, she found her way to Silver Dan's.

A couple of weeks after that, Dan Silver found his way to her.

Of course he did.

The owner of a strip club-in this case, a chain of strip clubs-has a sort of droit du seigneur when it comes to the girls. They don't have to date him, and if they do date him, they don't have to sleep with him, but it's a good professional move if they do.

You sleep with the boss, you don't have to blow the night manager to get a good shift. The bartenders pour your drinks without coming on to you or wanting a cut. The other girls find space for you in front of the mirror. The really creepy customers pick up on the vibe and keep their distance.

Tammy had been around long enough to know that, and even if she hadn't, Angela would have told her. Angela was her best friend at Silver Dan's. They hit it off right away-similar background, similar outlook, same tough attitude. It was Angela who told her that if the boss came calling, she'd better open the gates, or life could get impossible for her at the club.

So she dated Dan.

Yeah, but it was more than that, wasn't it, if she really wants to look at the truth of herself. Dan wasn't just a convenient lay or a good dinner- like most pimps, he was a daddy. He was that fucking father figure she'd been missing. Clichй, clichй, stereotype, and clichй but there it was. He treated her like a daughter and a fuck, incest sans the DNA and felony concerns, made her obey him and wear the clothes he picked out, made her call him “Daddy” as he did her from behind and pulled her hair like you'd jerk on the reins of a recalcitrant filly. She hated it and she loved it.

She started sleeping with Mick Penner as rebellion. He was the opposite of a daddy-a boy-child lady-killer who fucked up and fell in love with her. She'd still come when Dan beckoned-and God knows how many other women he was doing on the side-but she'd go bang Mick and play house with him, and Mick treated her gently and with consideration, and she couldn't get too much of that.