The Gentlemen's Hour

45

Rabbit and Echo drive Boone back to the Spy Store to pick up the Deuce.

Eddie will kill you but he won’t inconvenience you, because it would violate his sense of aloha.

“I owe you a shot,” Boone tells Rabbit.

“I shame, bruddah.”

“I shame.”

“Nothing personal.”

“Personal.”

“As awri,” Boone says. That’s all right.

“Ass why hard,” Rabbit says.

“Ass why—”

“Shut up.”

Rabbit and Echo are actually kind of fond of Boone, who’s always treated them pretty nicely, not to mention the fact that Eddie is protective of Boone, even though he now officially hates his haole guts.

“Never trust a haole” has become Eddie’s new mantra.

He’ll actually sit cross-legged on his half-pipe platform first thing every morning—which for him is about eleven o’clock—and chant, “

Om mane padme hung,

never trust a haole,” one hundred times or until he gets sick of doing it, which is usually about six reps. Then he smokes a big bowl of pakololo to enhance his aloha, which it massively does.

By this time the chef has the Spam fired up.

Then Eddie has to figure out how to kill the whole day without going more than seventy-five feet from his house. This usually involves numerous business meetings, his physical therapist, his masseuse, constant refreshment of Maui Wowie, sunbathing, skateboarding, thousand-dollar-a-throw call girls, and dozens of video games with Rabbit and Echo, none of which they’d better come close to winning.

His other pastime is surfing medical Web sites because he’s allowed necessary visits to consult with a physician. So Eddie has developed a staggering variety of physical symptoms that would arouse the envy of the most ambitious hypochondriac. Since his arrest, Eddie has been tested for lupus, fibromyalgia, cholera, and an elusive yet persistent recurrence of “Raratonga fever,” for which he is even now seeking permission to travel to Lucerne to consult with the world’s only, and therefore preeminent, specialist—a haole.

Anyway, Rabbit feels a little bad about punching Boone, and Echo . . . uhhh . . . echoes the sentiment. They drop him off back at the Deuce.

“You take care, eh, Boone?”

“Care.”

“Bumbye,” Boone says.

By and by, later.

He climbs into the Deuce and heads for The Sundowner.

On the way he calls Dan Nichols, and then Johnny Banzai.