Dawn Patrol - Don Winslow [28]
“Anything you want,” the guy said. “Anything you want in this world.”
“I don’t want anything,” Boone said.
Eddie tried to lay cash on him, dope on him; Eddie wanted to buy him a freaking house, a boat. Boone finally settled for dinner at the Marine Room. Eddie offered to buy him the Marine Room.
“I don’t see myself in the restaurant business,” Boone said.
“What do you see yourself in?” Eddie asked. “You want in my business, brah, speak the word, I’ll set you up.”
“I play for the other team,” Boone said, not meaning that he was a lesbian all-female outrigger canoe paddler, but a freaking police officer.
Not that it got in the way of their friendship. Boone wasn’t on the narc squad and he didn’t make judgments. He had done a little herb in his grom past, and even though he’d grown out of it, he didn’t much care what other people did.
So he and Eddie started hanging out a little bit. Eddie became sort of an adjunct member of The Dawn Patrol, although he didn’t turn up too often because dawn for Eddie is about one p.m. But he did come around, got to know Dave and Tide, Hang, Sunny and even Johnny, who kept a little distance, due to the potentially adversarial nature of their professions.
Boone, Dave, and Tide would go over to Eddie’s house and watch MMA matches on his flat-screen plasma. Eddie’s really big into the mixed martial arts, which sprang up in Hawaii anyway, and sponsors his team of fighters, named, unsurprisingly enough, Team Eddie. So they’d hang and watch the fights, or go in Eddie’s entourage to the live shows in Anaheim, and Eddie even got Boone to voyage as far away from the ocean as Las Vegas to catch some fights with him and Dave.
And most of The Dawn Patrol was present at Eddie’s notorious housewarming party in La Jolla.
Eddie’s sprawling modernist mansion occupies an acre on a bluff overlooking the ocean at Bird Rock. The neighbors were, like, appalled, what with the moke guys coming and going, and the parties, and the pounding music, the sounds from Eddie’s skateboard tube (Eddie has been known to board off the roof of his house into the barrel), his skeet-shooting range, and his racing up and down the street on his mountain bike while screened by a squadron of heavily armed bodyguards. So the pink polo shirt, yellow golf trouser set that live around Eddie was seriously geeked by him, but what were they going to do about it?
Nothing, that’s what.
Nada.
They weren’t going over there to complain about the noise; they weren’t going to call the police; they weren’t going to go to the zoning board with questions about whether a skeet-shooting range or private skateboard park were even allowed in their heretofore quiet neighborhood. They weren’t going to do any of these things, because the neighbors were scared shitless of Red Eddie.
Eddie felt bad about this and tried to alleviate their anxieties by inviting the whole neighborhood over for a luau one Sunday afternoon.
Of course, it turned into a shipwreck.
And one of the first people Eddie invited aboard the Titanic was Boone.
“You gotta come,” Eddie said into the phone after he’d explained the purpose behind the invitation. “Moral support. Bring your whole hui, the ohana.”
By which he meant The Dawn Patrol.
Boone was reluctant, to say the least. It doesn’t take a weather vane to know which way the wind blows, and it didn’t take a Savonarola to predict how this little Sunday afternoon gathering was going to turn out. But misery does love company, so Boone brought the subject up at the very next meeting of The Dawn Patrol and was surprised when most of them actually expressed enthusiasm about going.
“You’re kidding, right?” Boone asked.
“I wouldn’t miss this circus for the world,” Johnny Banzai said.
Yeah, well, circus was about right.
The hula dancers were fine, the ukulele, slack-key guitar, and surfreggae combo was interesting, if somewhat esoteric, and the sumo wrestlers were, well, sumo wrestlers. High Tide, a late entry, nevertheless