Dawn Patrol - Don Winslow [31]
“What happened then and now?”
“A woman was murdered,” Boone says. “That puts it over the line.”
Red Eddie doesn’t look happy.
“So much as I hate to say no to you,” Boone says. “I have to ride this one through, bro.”
Red Eddie looks out to the ocean.
“Big swell coming,” he says. “There’s gonna be some real thunder crushers out there. Wave like that can suck you in and take you over the falls. Man’s not careful, Boone Dawg, he could get crushed.”
“Yeah,” Boone says, “I know a little about big waves sucking people in, Eddie.”
“I know you do, brah,” Eddie says. “I know you do.”
Red Eddie does a doughnut and pedals away. Shouts over his shoulder, “E malama pono!”
Take care of yourself.
24
Johnny Banzai goes back into room 342 at the Crest Motel.
It’s your basic Pacific Beach motel room away from the water. Cheap and basic. Two twin beds, a television set bolted to a counter, the remote control bolted to a bedside table beside a clock radio. A couple of sunfaded photographs of beach scenes hang on the walls in cheap frames. A glass slider opens out to the little balcony. It’s open, of course, and a light breeze blows the thin curtain back inside the room.
It took Johnny a while to settle Harrington down. You put Boone Daniels in front of Harrington, it’s the proverbial red cape before a bull. The lieutenant wanted to know just what the fuck Boone was doing there, and, truth be told, so does Johnny.
For a PI, Boone is a shitty liar, and besides, he does very little matrimonial work. And no PI in his right mind brings the wife along to see live and in color what the husband’s been up to. Not to mention the fact that the woman is a real looker who is not likely to be cheated on, and that she wasn’t wearing a wedding ring.
So Boone’s story is bullshit totale, and one of the very next things that Johnny is going to do is track Boone down and find out what he was doing at a motel where a woman played Rocky the Flying Squirrel with tragic results.
Now, Johnny Banzai and Boone Daniels are boys.
They go way back together, all the way to fifth grade, where they would drop their pencils at the same time so they could duck under their desks together, look at Miss Oliveira’s legs, and giggle.
That was before Johnny got into the soft-core porn business.
What Johnny would do was buy back issues of Playboy from an older cousin, cut out the pictures, and slip them into the lining of his three-ring binder, which he had carefully sliced and covered over for the purpose. Then he’d sell them in the boys’ room for fifty cents to a dollar each.
Johnny was doing a brisk trade in the boys’ room one day when some ninth graders came in and decided to take him off. Boone came in like “Here I am to save the day,” the surfer dude ready to rescue his little yellow brother, except that Johnny didn’t exactly need rescuing.
Boone had heard the word judo before, but he had never seen judo, and now he watched in sheer awe as Johnny literally wiped the floor with one of his attackers, while a second sat against the wall trying to remember his name, and the third just stood there rethinking the whole idea.
Boone punched him in the stomach, just to help the thought process along a little bit.
That was it—he and Johnny had been friends before, but now they were friends. And when Johnny took his porn money down to Pacific Surf and bought a board with it, they were locked in. They’ve been buddies ever since, and when all the shit went down with Boone, Johnny was the only cop who stood by him. Johnny would kill for Boone and knows that Boone would do the same for him.
But—
They inhabit roughly the same professional sphere, and there are times when the Venn diagram intersects. Usually when this happens they’re on the same side—they cooperate, share information. They’ve even done stakeouts together. But there are other times when they find themselves on opposite sides of a case.