Dawn Patrol - Don Winslow [82]
She’s real impressed by the argument. “Where’s my phone?”
“Soaked in cold salt water,” Boone says. “I don’t think you’re going to get a lot of bars.”
“Let me use yours.”
“I was in the water beside you.”
“You don’t have a phone in your house?” she asks.
“No.”
“What if people want to get hold of you?”
“That’s why I don’t have a phone in my house,” Boone says. He doesn’t tell her about the three other cellies he has in a kitchen drawer. He’s blown away. The woman hasn’t said one word or asked one question about her friend Angela, who took her rap for her. All she cares about is a slick boob butcher who likes to do little migrant girls. A guy who gave her up in a heartbeat to save his own worthless ass.
Nice.
“Do you think he’s all right?” she asks.
“Couldn’t care less.”
“I want to see him.”
“You’re not going anywhere.”
“You can’t keep me here against my will,” she says.
He’s had it. “That’s true. Go out there, Tammy. Go find Dr. Short Eyes, see what happens. But don’t expect me to come to your funeral.”
“Fuck you,” Tammy says. “I’m a payday to you, that’s all. You need me alive so you can pick up your check. It doesn’t give you the right to moral judgments, cowboy.”
“You’re right.”
“And I don’t need you to tell me that,” Tammy says. “I know what you think of me. I’m a stripper—a dumb piece of meat. Either I have a drug problem or I’m fucked up because my daddy didn’t pay me enough attention, or else I’m just too lazy to get a real job. I’m a skank. But it doesn’t stop you from coming in with your dollar bills, does it?”
True, Boone thinks. And it doesn’t stop me wanting to keep you alive. Or is it that I just need to deliver you to the courtroom?
“Stay away from the windows,” Boone says. “Keep your head down. In fact, you might be better off in the bedroom.”
“You think you’re the first guy to tell me that?” she asks, eyes hard as emeralds.
“I’ll make you a deal,” Boone says. “I don’t judge you and you don’t judge you.”
“Easier said than done.”
“Yeah.”
She sneers. “What would you know about it, surfer dude?”
“You don’t have a monopoly on regrets, Tammy.”
Boone can feel the ocean swell, literally under his feet. The waves push against the pilings, wash through, and then pull on their way out. The big swell is coming, and when it goes out again, it will take with it the life he knew. He can feel it, and it scares the hell out of him. He wants to hold on, but he knows there’s no holding on against the sea.
When a tsunami comes in, it hits with incredibly destructive force, crushing lives and homes. But it’s almost worse when it recedes, dragging lives out into the endless sea that is the irredeemable past.
77
Petra gets out of the shower, then wanders into Boone’s bedroom, telling herself she’s going to catch a quick nap, but really to snoop.
No, not snoop, she thinks.
Simply to find out a little more about the man.
Like the rest of the place, the bedroom is neat and clean. Nothing remarkable about it, save for the fishing pole sticking out of the window, except …
Books.
Used paperbacks on a bedside table and in a small bookcase in the corner. Some stacked by the bed. And not just the sports books or crime novels that she might have expected if she thought that he actually read, but genuine literature—Dostoyevsky, Turgenev, Gorky. Over in the corner is a stack of—Can it be? she thinks—Trollope. Our oceangoing nature boy is a crypto–Phineas Finn?
She thinks of all the little jibes she’s given him all day about being an uneducated philistine, then thinks about the books that are stacked on her bedside table—trashy romance novels and bodice rippers that she doesn’t have to read anyway. And he’s been having me on all day, his private little joke.
Bastard.
She keeps snooping.
There’s a small desk in the corner, with a computer and terminal on it. Guiltily, she slides the desk drawer open and sees photographs of a little girl.
A darling, almost a stereotype of your classic California girl—blond hair, big blue eyes, a spray of