Dawn Patrol - Don Winslow [95]
Either I do it or this is my life.
Humping coffee and eggs.
Tim Mackie holds up his mug again and points.
Sunny holds up her middle finger.
98
Tammy comes out of the bedroom into the kitchen.
Boone gives her the good news.
Her response is underwhelming.
But predictable.
“I want to talk to Teddy.”
“Once again,” Petra says, “I don’t think that’s such a good—”
“Either I talk to Teddy,” Tammy says, “or I don’t testify. You think it over, let me know what you decide.”
She walks back into the bedroom.
“Succinct,” Boone says.
99
They reach Teddy at his home number.
Wife must be out of town, Boone thinks.
He hands the phone to Tammy.
“Teddy?” she asks. “Are you alone?”
That’s all she asks. That’s it. After all the “I want to talk to Teddy” OCD, she asks that one question, apparently gets her answer, and punches off.
Then says, “Okay, I’ll testify.”
100
Downtown San Diego is surprisingly small.
You can easily walk around it in the better part of an hour, and it might be the only major city in the country where a healthy person can walk from the airport to downtown with no problem.
That walk would take you along the bay that borders downtown on the west and south, and created the city. Mexican explorers stopped in San Diego back in the 1500s for its excellent harbor and left behind the usual mixture of soldiers and missionaries that defined most of Southern California until the Anglos took it in 1843. By the 1850s, a fleet of Chinese junks fished for tuna from the harbor, but were later moved out by Anglo and Italian fishermen.
Downtown was pretty sleepy until the big real estate boom of the 1880s, when town fathers like the Hortons, Crosswhites, and Marstons built up a legitimate downtown with office buildings, stores, banks, and restaurants. The seedy Stingaree District, with its bars, gambling joints, and brothels thrived between downtown and the southern harbor, and madams like Ida Bailey and gamblers and procurers like Wyatt Earp and his wife made fortunes and gave San Diego the risqué reputation that still clings to it today down in what is now known as the Gaslamp District.
But it was the U.S. Navy that really defined downtown San Diego and still does. From virtually anywhere you stand in downtown, you can see a navy base or a ship. Take that walk from the airport and you’ll see aircraft carriers docked in the harbor, navy planes landing at their base on North Island. Sometimes you’ll see a submarine pop up from underwater right in the bay and glide into port.
San Diego is a navy town.
Back in 1915, the good city fathers chased all the brothels out of the Gaslamp, but then they had to invite them back when the navy threatened to stop its ships from calling in port, an embargo that would have bankrupted the city.
And it’s more than symbolic that downtown’s major street, Broadway, ends on a pier.
A few blocks east on Broadway sits the courthouse.
Petra, with Boone in the passenger seat and Tammy in the back, pulls into the parking structure of her office building and finds her designated spot.
Tammy looks great cleaned up in a cream-colored blouse over a black skirt that Petra bought for her in the ladies’ department at Nordstrom, which is really no surprise. What did surprise Petra was how good Boone could look.
She didn’t think he owned a sports jacket, never mind the tailored black suit with a crisp white shirt and a sedate blue tie.
“Wow,” she said. “I had no idea.”
“I have two suits,” Boone replied. “A summer wedding and funeral suit and a winter wedding and funeral suit. This is the winter wedding and funeral suit, which doubles as a going-to-court suit.”
“Do you go to court a lot?”
“No.” Nor to very many weddings, Boone thinks, and, even more fortunate, to fewer funerals.
They walk out of the parking structure and walk the two blocks to the courthouse.
The courtroom is