The Gentlemen's Hour

7

Boone walks to the office, upstairs from the Pacific Surf Shop where Hang Twelve is pretty busy renting boogie boards and fins to tourists. Hang has a family of five on his hands, the kids arguing about which color board they’re going to get. Hang looks real happy, not. Speaking of unhappiness, he warns, “Cheerful’s up there.”

Ben Carruthers, aka Cheerful, is Boone’s friend, a miserable, saturnine millionaire who would qualify for the Gentlemen’s Hour if he didn’t actually loathe the water. He’s lived in Pacific Beach for thirty years and has never actually been to the beach or the Pacific.

“What do you have against the beach?” Boone asked him once.

“It’s sandy.”

“The beach is sand.”

“Exactly,” Cheerful answered. “And I don’t like water either.”

Which pretty much does it, beachwise.

Cheerful is, to say the least, eccentric, and one of his weirder things is a quixotic crusade to stabilize Boone’s finances. The utter futility of this exercise makes him blissfully unhappy, hence the sobriquet. Right now he has his tall frame slouched over an old-style adding machine. His slate-gray hair, styled in a high crew cut, looks like brushed steel.

“Nice of you to make an appearance,” he says, pointedly looking at his watch as Boone comes upstairs.

“Things are slow,” Boone says. He steps out of his boardshorts, kicks off his sandals, and goes into the little bathroom that adjoins the office.

“You think you’re going to speed them up by not coming in till eleven?” Cheerful asks. “You think work just floats around on the water?”

“As a matter of fact . . .” Boone says, turning on the shower. He tells Cheerful about his conversation with Dan, adding with a certain sadistic satisfaction that Nichols is FedExing a substantial retainer.

“You demanded a retainer?” Cheerful asks.

“It was his idea.”

“For a moment,” Cheerful says, “I thought you had learned some fiscal responsibility.”

“Nah.”

Boone steps into the shower just long enough to rinse the salt water off his skin, then gets out and dries off. He doesn’t bother to wrap the towel around himself as he steps back into the office to look for a clean shirt—okay, a reasonably undirty shirt—and a pair of jeans.

Petra Hall is standing there.

Of course she is, Boone thinks.

“Hello, Boone,” she says. “Nice to see you.”

She looks gorgeous, in a cool linen suit, her black hair cut in a retro pageboy, her violet eyes shining.

“Hi, Pete,” Boone says. “Nice to be seen.”

Smooth, he thinks as he retreats into the bathroom.

Idiot.