Dawn Patrol - Don Winslow [26]
Lifeguard candidates go to great lengths either to get into Dave’s training classes or to dodge them. The ones who aspire to be great want him as their instructor; the ones who just want to get by avoid him like wet-suit rash.
Because Dave is brutal.
He tries to wash them out, doing everything this side of legal to expose their weaknesses—physical, mental, or emotional.
“If they’re going to fail,” he said one day to Boone as they watched one of his classes do underwater sit-ups in the break, “I want it to be now, not when some poor kook who’s about to drown needs them to succeed.”
That’s the thing: It doesn’t matter if there’s twenty people taken out by the undertow or blood in the water and sharks circling; a lifeguard has to arrive in the middle of that chaos as cool as a March morning and ask in a mellow tone if people would like to work their way to shore now, but there’s, like, no rush.
Because the thing that kills most people in the water is panic.
They brain-lock and do stupid things—try to fight the tide, or swim in exactly the wrong direction, or start flapping their arms and wearing themselves out. If they’d just chill out and lie back, or tread water, and wait for the cavalry to arrive, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, they’d be okay. But they panic and start to hyperventilate and then it’s over—unless that calm, cool lifeguard is out there to bring them back.
This is why Dave keeps trying to recruit Boone.
He knows that BD would make a great lifeguard. Boone’s a natural waterman with genius-level ocean smarts, an indefatigable swimmer, his body ripped from daily surfing. And as for cool, well, Boone is the walking definition of cool.
The panic gene just skipped Boone.
And it’s not just speculation on Dave’s part. Boone was out there that day the riptide took all those people. Just happened to be there shooting the shit with Dave and deliberately swam out into a riptide and paddled around, calming the terrified tourists, propping up the ones who were about to go under, and smiling and laughing like he was in a warm wading pool.
And Dave will never forget what he heard Boone saying to the people as the lifeguard and his crew were desperately struggling to save lives: “Hey, no worries! We’ve got the best people in the world out here to bring us in!”
“What brings you to my realm?” Dave asks him now.
“Business.”
“Anytime you’re ready to sign on the dotted,” Dave says, “I have a gig for you. You could be wearing a pair of these way-cool Day-Glo orange trunks inside a month.”
It’s a joke between them—why lifeguard trunks, life jackets, and even life rafts are manufactured in the exact color that research has shown is most tantalizing to sharks. Day-Glo orange is just catnip to a great white.
“You have an encyclopedic knowledge of local strippers,” Boone says.
“And a lot of people think that’s easy,” Dave says. “They don’t realize the long hours, the dedication—”
“The sacrifices you make.”
“The sacrifices,” Dave agrees.
“But I do.”
“And I appreciate that, BD,” Dave says. “How can I be of service to you?”
Boone’s not sure he can, but he’s hoping he can, because the dead woman at the pool had that stereotypical teased-out stripper hair, and a stripper body. And it’s been Boone’s experience that strippers have stripper friends. This is because of the odd hours, and also because women who aren’t strippers usually don’t want to have friends who are because they’re afraid the dancers will steal their boyfriends.
So he’s playing the odds that say the Jane Doe is a stripper.
“I need to ID a dancer,” Boone says. “Redhead, an off-the-rack rack, an angel tattoo on her left wrist.”
“Gimme putt,” Dave says. “Angela Hart.”
“Angel Heart?”
“A nom de strip,” Dave says. “What about her?”
“She a … uh, friend of yours?”
“A gentleman doesn’t tell, BD,” says Dave. “But that’s a serious tone you’ve adopted. What’s underneath it?”
“She’s dead.”
Dave stares out over the ocean. The waves are starting to get bigger, and choppy, and the color of the water is a dark gray.