Dawn Patrol - Don Winslow [102]
“You’re my bitch.”
“If you say so,” Boone says, folding his arms across his chest and closing his eyes. He feels the guy reach out to grab him, flicks his hands out to separate the guy’s arms, then knife-edges both his own hands into the guy’s neck.
The guy is done now; he just doesn’t know it yet. Stunned from the double strike to the carotids, he can’t react quickly enough as Boone slides his hands around the back of his neck, holds his head, and brings his knee up three times into his chin. Boone lets go, pushes, and the guy slides to the floor unconscious, blood trickling from his mouth.
Boone lies back down.
There’s a short pause; then the tweeker who had offered Boone a bologna sandwich and a blow job scoots over to rob the unconscious man. He reaches inside his shirt and yanks out a small chain with a little crucifix on it, holds it up to Boone, and asks, “You want this?”
Because jailhouse law says it belongs to Boone by right of conquest.
Boone shakes his head.
Thinking, You’re an idiot, Daniels.
A total barney.
He gets up from the bench, steps over a few guys to get to the bars, and calls out to the jailer. “Yo, bro! Any word on me getting out of here?”
107
Yeah, as a matter of fact.
Ten minutes later he walks out of the building with Petra. She tries to put a brave face on things. “At least now,” she says, “you can catch your ‘big swell.’ ”
“Doesn’t matter,” Boone says.
It doesn’t? Petra thinks. Because it certainly seemed to matter a great deal just a day ago. My God, could it have been just a day?
Boone asks, “Can I borrow your car?”
To go to the beach? she wonders. She starts to ask, but there’s an energy to him that makes her stop. It’s a man she hasn’t seen before—intense, focused. It’s admirable, but also a little frightening.
“You’re not going to push it off a cliff, are you?” she asks.
“Not planning on it.”
She digs into her purse and hands him the keys.
“Thanks,” Boone says. “I’ll get it back to you.”
“I’m taking that to mean,” Petra says, “that you don’t want me to go with you.”
He looks at her with seriousness that, again, she hasn’t seen in him before, and again, that simultaneously scares and excites her.
“Look,” he says, “there are some things you have to do alone. Can you dig that?”
“I can.”
“I’m going to make this all right.”
“I know you are.”
He leans down and kisses her lightly on the cheek, then turns and walks away with a stride that she can only describe to herself as “purposeful.”
She gets it.
Thinks, You have a few things to make right, yourself.
Petra calls a cab and tells the driver to take her to The Sundowner.
108
Boone drives to Tammy’s place.
She won’t be home—Danny will have whisked her away somewhere by now. He parks Petra’s car right out front, takes the stairs up to Tammy’s place, and picks the lock.
The apartment’s the usual usual. He heads right for the bedroom because that’s where people keep their secrets, there or in the bathroom. Tammy’s bedroom looks a lot like Angela’s, right down to the same framed picture of the two of them on top of the bureau.
And you’re an idiot, Boone thinks. You look at her in those pictures, she hasn’t changed a bit. Teddy didn’t do any work on her, so what’s up between them?
He goes into the bathroom and opens the medicine cabinet. Nothing on the shelves of any interest, but a small wallet-size photo is carefully wedged into the seam between the glass and the frame on the lower left corner of the inside of the cabinet door.
It’s a face shot of a young girl. The picture was taken outdoors, but the background is indistinct due to low light and the close-up on the face, but—
The girl from the strawberry fields, the reeds.
The girl in the motel room with Teddy.
Probably Latina, judging from the brown skin, long, straight black hair, and dark eyes. But she could be Native American, hard to tell. What she definitely is, is a very pretty, sweet-looking little girl with a shy, hesitant smile, wearing a cross on a thin silver chain.
The same cross and chain that Dan Silver took out