Don Winslow - Dawn Patrol

Johnny gets on the radio.

The Sex Crimes Unit is there in five minutes, with a SWAT team. The SCU lieutenant is a woman named Terry Gilman, who used to work homicide and then jumped from the frying pan into the shit fire. She walks up to Johnny's car.

“Where'd you get this, Johnny?” she asks.

“You're looking good, Terry.”

She straps a vest on, checks the load in her. 9mm, and says, “If we don't find evidence, will your source testify?”

“Let's find the evidence,” Johnny says as he gets out of the car.

“Sounds good to me.” Terry Gilman is pissed. She hates snakeheads in general and snakeheads who run children in particular. She's almost hoping this thing goes south so she can use the nine on one of them.

They hit the front door like Normandy.

A SWAT guy swings the heavy ram and the door cracks open. Johnny is the first guy through. He ignores the adults scrambling to get away- SWAT will wrap them up. He just keeps pushing through until he comes to a door that opens to a basement stairway.

Pistol in front of him, he goes down the stairs.

It's a dormitory, a barracks of sorts.

Dirty mattresses are set side by side on the concrete slab. A rough open shower in one corner, an open toilet in the other. Blankets everywhere. A few dirty, stained pillows. An old TV set hooked up to a video player.

Kids' movies.

A few children's books in Spanish.

The girls from the boat have jammed themselves into one corner. They stand there holding one another, staring at him in sheer terror.

“It's all right,” Johnny says to them, lowering his pistol. “It's all going to be all right now.”

Maybe it is, he thinks.

I have these kids.

But where are the children who were living here?

Boone drives past the reed bed and keeps going until he finds a place where he can turn off and see the fields and the road.

Now he sits and looks at the fields, silver and dewy as the sun starts to rise behind the hills to the east. On the far side of the fields, where they dip to meet the river, the reed bed stands like a wall, sealing the fields off from the rest of the world, blending into a line of trees that old man Sakagawa planted as a windbreak so many years ago.

On the other side of the fields, on a small rise near its eastern edge, old Sakagawa's house sits in a small grove of lemon and walnut trees. The old man will be getting up soon, Boone thinks, if he isn't already, sitting at his table with his tea and his rice with pickled vegetables.

The workers are already coming out, filing onto the fields with their tools over their shoulders, like the rifles of soldiers moving out on a early-morning mission. An army of phantoms, they come from nowhere. They hide at night in the creases and folds of the San Diego landscape, emerge in the soft light of the early dawn, coming into the open to work, and then disappear again at dusk into the wrinkles and seams, the last unwanted places.

They're the invisible, the people we don't see or choose not to see, even in the bright light of day. They're the unspoken truth, the unseen reality behind the California dream. There before we wake up, gone before we fall asleep again.

Boone settles back and watches them start to work. They fan out in well-organized lines, practiced, almost ritualistic, silent. They work with their backs bent and their heads down. They work slowly, in a methodic rhythm. There's no hurry to get done. The field will be here all day, was here yesterday, will be here tomorrow.

But not for many tomorrows, Boone thinks. He wonders if these men know that someday soon they will not be out here. It will be the bulldozers and road graders that will come out at dawn, machines, not men who work like a collective machine. Exhaust fumes instead of sweat.

In place of the fields, there will be luxury homes and condominiums. A shopping plaza or a mall. In place of the workers, there will be residents and shoppers and diners. And these men will have disappeared to some other netherworld.

Boone feels a bit of welcome warmth come through the car window. The sun has crested the mountains.

Johnny goes back upstairs.

Lieutenant Gilman is standing beside the prisoners, who are sitting on the floor, their arms cuffed behind them. Three men, two women.

“Whoever they had here,” Johnny whispers to her, “they're gone.”

She looks to him and Harrington. “Do what you need to do.”

Harrington steps over to one of the skells, who made the mistake of making eye contact. He lifts him to his feet. “What's your name?”

“Marco.”

“Let's you and I go have a little chat, Marco,” Harrington says. He walks him down the hall, toward the bedrooms. “You don't have to come, Johnny.”

“No, I'm in,” Johnny says.

He follows Harrington down the hallway, into one of the bedrooms, and closes the door behind him. Harrington bounces Marco off the wall, catches him on the rebound, and knees him in the balls. He lifts his head and says, “I am not fucking with you, asswipe. You're going to tell me where those kids are, or you're going to pull a gun on me and I'm going to have to paint the wall with your brains. And that's my second shot. My first goes into your gut. їComprende, amigo? ”

“I speak English,” Marco says.

“Well you'd better start speaking it,” Harrington says. He pulls his pistol and jams it into Marco's stomach.

“They just left,” Marco says.

“Left for where?”

“The fields.”

“ Whatfields?”

“The strawberry fields.”

Johnny feels his skin go cold. “ What? Whatdid you say?”

“The strawberry fields,” Marco says. “The old Sakagawa strawberry fields.”

Johnny feels dizzy, like the room is spinning. Shame flows through his blood. He lurches to the door and shoves it open. Staggers down the hall, through the living room, and out the door. He leans on the car and bends over to catch his breath.

It's coming on dawn.

The first faint rays of sunlight hit Pacific Beach, warming, if only psychologically, the crowd of photographers, magazine people, surf company execs, lookie-loos, and hard-core surfers who stand shivering on Pacific Beach Point in the cold morning, waiting for the light.

The bluff they're standing on is historic ground. Surfers have been riding that reef break almost since George Freeth, and it was way back in the 1930s, when this was still a Japanese strawberry field, that Baker and Paskowitz and some of the other San Diego legends built a shack on this bluff and stored their boards here and proudly adopted the name that the farmers gave them-“the Vandals.”

Just off to the north, the big swell is pounding the reef. Sunny stands at the edge of the crowd, her board beside her like a crusader's shield, and watches the sunlight turn the indistinct gray shapes into definitive waves.

Big waves.

The biggest she's ever seen.

Mackers.

Thunder crushers.

Dreams.

She glances around her. Half the big-wave riders in the world are here, most of them professionals with fat sponsorships and double-digit mag covers behind them. Worse, most of them have Jet Skis with them. Jet Skis with trained partners who will pull them into the waves. Sunny doesn't have the cash for that. She's one of the few paddle-in surfers out here.

And the only woman.

“Thank you, Kuan Yin,” she says softly. She isn't going to bitch about what she lacks; she's going to be grateful about what makes her unique. The only woman, and a woman who's going to paddle into the big waves.

She picks up her board and heads down toward the water.

Dave's out there already.