Dawn Patrol - Don Winslow [44]
Even in San Diego, you never know when it might rain.
32
“Well?” Petra asks when he gets back to the van.
“You’re sort of a woman,” Boone says. “Do you remember what kind of scent Tammy wears?”
“CK,” Petra replies, ignoring the insult. “Why?”
He pulls out the bottle of nail polish and shows it to her.
“That’s what she wore to our meeting.”
“She was just there,” Boone says, slamming his hand into the wheel. “She was just there.”
Petra is a bit surprised, and pleased, to see him display a little frustration. My God, she thinks, could it be a sign of some drive in the man? She’s also amused, and a little intrigued, that he has a knowledge of women’s perfumes.
“They might have her,” Boone says. He explains what he saw in Angela’s apartment.
“What do we do?” she asks.
“We cruise the neighborhood,” he says, “in case she’s still around, not knowing what to do or where to go next. If we don’t see her, you take a taxi back to your office while I canvass the neighborhood.”
He would have just said “while I hang out and talk to people,” but he thought she’d like “canvass the neighborhood” better. Besides, it might distract her from the “back to your office” part.
It doesn’t.
“Why is my absence required?” she asks.
“Because no one will talk to you,” Boone says. “And they won’t talk to me if I’m with you.”
“I’m some sort of social leper?”
“Yes.”
Sort of a woman, she thinks. Social leper. Then she says, “Men will talk to me.”
Pleased by his lack of response, she adds, “Hang Twelve talked to me. Cheerful talked to me. They gave you up to me in a heartbeat.”
They did, Boone thinks. In less than a heartbeat.
“Okay,” he says. “You can hang.”
Lovely, she thinks. I can hang.
33
Yeah, she hangs, but that doesn’t produce Tammy Roddick.
If Tammy is walking the streets of Ocean Beach, she’s disguised as a wino, an old hippie, a middle-aged hippie, a young retro hippie, a white rasta dude with blond dreads, an emaciated vegan, a retired guy, or one of the dozen or so surfers waiting for the big swell to go off at Rockslide.
Petra talks to all of them.
Having established the point that she can talk to men, she feels obligated to do just that, and she gets a lot of useful information.
The wino (for two dollars) tells her that she has a lovely smile; the old hippie informs her that rain is nature’s way of moistening the earth; the middle-aged hippie hasn’t seen Tammy but knows a wonderful place for green tea; the young retro hippie hasn’t seen Tammy, either, but offers to give Petra a Reiki massage to ease her obvious tension (and his). The white rasta guy knows exactly where Tammy is and will take Petra there for the price of a cigar, except that he describes Tammy as a five-foot-four blonde, while the vegan informs her that his clean diet makes his natural essences taste sweet, and the retired guy hasn’t seen Tammy but offers to spend the rest of his life helping Petra look for her.
The surfers tell her to come back after the big swell.
“Guys will definitely talk to you,” Boone says when Petra tells him about her conversations. “No question.”
“And I suppose you, on the other hand, have produced a definite lead.”
Nope.
Nobody’s seen anybody who looks like Tammy. Nobody on the street saw her leaving Angela’s building. Nobody saw nothing.
“So now what do we do?” Petra asks.
“We go to her place of employment,” Boone says.
“I hardly think she’s at work,” Petra snaps.
“I hardly think so, either,” Boone says. “But someone there might know something?”
“Oh,” Petra says. She looks at her watch. “But it’s only two in the afternoon. Don’t we want to wait until evening?”
“Strip clubs are open twenty-four/seven.”
“They are?” Petra says. Then: “Of course, I suppose you’d know.”
“Believe it or not,” Boone says as he gets back into the Boonemobile, “I really don’t spend that much time in strip clubs. As a matter of fact, I rarely go to them at all.”
“Sure you don’t.”
Boone shrugs. “Believe