Dawn Patrol

9

Boone walks into Pacific Surf.

Hang Twelve looks up from Grand Theft Auto 3 and says, “There's an inland betty upstairs looking for you. And Cheerful's way aggro.”

“Cheerful's always aggravated,” Boone replies. “That's what makes him Cheerful. Who's the woman?”

“Dunno.” Hang Twelve shrugs. “But, Boone, she's smokin' hot.”

Boone goes upstairs. The woman isn't smokin' hot; she's smokin' cold.

But she is definitely smokin'.

“Mr. Daniels?” Petra says.

“Guilty.”

She offers her hand, and Boone is about to shake it, when he realizes that she's handing him her card.

“Petra Hall,” she says. “From the law firm Burke, Spitz and Culver.”

Boone knows the law firm of Burke, Spitz and Culver. They have an office in one of the glass castles in downtown San Diego and have sent him a lot of work over the past few years.

And Alan Burke surfs.

Not every day, but a lot of weekends, and sometimes Boone sees him out on the line during the Gentlemen's Hour. So he knows Alan Burke, but he doesn't know this small, beautiful woman with the midnight hair and the blue eyes.

Or are they gray?

“You must be new with the firm,” Boone says.

Petra's appalled as she watches Boone reach behind his back and pull the cord that's connected to a zipper. The back of the wet suit opens, and then Boone gently peels the suit off his right arm, then his left, then rolls it down his chest. She starts to turn away as he rolls the suit down over his waist, and then she sees the flower pattern of his North Shore board trunks appear.

She's looking at a man who appears to be in his late twenties or early thirties, but it's hard to tell because he has a somewhat boyish face, made all the more so by his slightly too long, unkempt, sun-streaked brown hair, which is either intentionally unstylishly long or has simply not been cut recently. He's tall, just an inch or two shorter than the saturnine old man still banging away on the adding machine, and he has the wide shoulders and long arm muscles of a swimmer.

Boone's oblivious to her observation.

He's all about the swell.

“There's a swell rolling down from the Aleutians,” he says as he finishes rolling the wet suit over his ankles. “It's going to hit sometime in the next two days and High Tide says it's only going to last a few hours. Biggest swell of the last four years and maybe the next four. Humongous waves.”

“Real BBM,” Hang Twelve says from the staircase.

“Is anyone watching the store?” Cheerful asks.

“There's no one down there,” Hang Twelve says.

“‘BBM’?” Petra asks.

“Brown boardshorts material,” Hang Twelve says helpfully.

“Lovely,” Petra says, wishing she hadn't asked. “Thank you.”

“Anyway,” Boone says as he steps into the small bathroom, turns on the shower, and carefully rinses not himself but the wet suit, “everyone's going out. Johnny Banzai's going to take a mental-health day, High Tide's calling in sick, Dave the Love God's on the beach anyway, and Sunny, well, you know Sunny's going to be out. Everyone is stoked. ”

Petra delivers the bad news.

She has work for him to do.

“Our firm,” Petra says, “is defending Coastal Insurance Company in a suit against it by one Daniel Silvieri, aka Dan Silver, owner of a strip club called Silver Dan's.”

“Don't know the place,” Boone says.

“Yeah you do, Boone,” Hang Twelve says. “You and Dave took me there for my birthday.”

“We took you to Chuck E. Cheese's,” Boone snaps. “Back-paddle.”

“Aren't you going to introduce me?”

It's amazing, Boone thinks, how Hang Twelve can suddenly speak actual English when there's an attractive woman involved. He says, “Petra Hall, Hang Twelve.”

“Another nom de idiot?” Petra asks.

“He has twelve toes,” Boone says.

“He does not,” says Petra. Then she looks down at his sandals. “He has twelve toes.”

“Six on each foot,” says Boone.

“Gives me sick traction on the board,” Hang Twelve says.

“The strip club is actually immaterial,” Petra says. “Mr. Silver also owns a number of warehouses up in Vista, one of which burned to the ground several months ago. The insurance company investigated and, from the physical evidence, deemed it arson and refused to pay. Mr. Silver is suing for damages and for bad faith. He wants five million dollars.”

“I'm not an arson investigator,” Boone says. “I can put you in touch with-”

“Mr. Silver was having a relationship with one of his dancers,” Petra continues. “One Ms. Tamara Roddick.”

“A strip club owner banging one of his dancers,” Boone says. “Just when you think you've seen it all…”

“Recently,” Petra says, “Mr. Silver broke off the relationship and suggested that Ms. Roddick find employment elsewhere.”

“Let me finish this for you,” Boone says. “The spurned young lady, in a sudden attack of conscience, decided that she couldn't live with the guilt anymore and came forward to the insurance company to confess that she saw Silver burn his building down.”

“Something like that, yes.”

“And you bought this shit?” Boone asks.

Alan Burke is way too smart to put this Tammy babe on the stand, Boone thinks. The opposing lawyer would shred her, and the rest of Burke's case with her.

“She passed a polygraph with flying colors,” Petra says.

“Oh,” Boone says. It's the best he can think of.

“So what's the problem?” he asks.

“The problem,” Petra says, “is that Ms. Roddick is scheduled to testify tomorrow.”

“Does she surf?” Boone asks.

“Not to my knowledge.”

“Then there's no problem.”

“When I tried to contact her yesterday,” Petra says, “to make arrangements for her testimony-and to bring her some court-appropriate clothes I bought for her-she didn't respond.”

“A flaky stripper,” Boone says. “Again, brave new world.”

“We've made repeated attempts to contact her,” Petra says. “She neither answers her phone nor returns messages. I rang her current employer, Totally Nude Girls. The manager informed me that she hasn't shown up for work for three days.”

“Have you checked the morgue?” Boone asks.

Five million dollars is a lot of money.

“Of course.”

“So she's taken off,” Boone says.

“You have a keen grasp of the obvious, Mr. Daniels,” Petra says. “Therefore, you should have no trouble discerning what it is that we require of you.”

“You want me to find her.”

“Full marks. Well done.”

“I'll get right on it,” Boone says. “As soon as the swell is over.”

“I'm afraid that won't do.”

“Nothing to be afraid of,” Boone says. “It's just that this.. .”

“Tamara.”

“… Tammy babe could be anywhere by now,” Boone says. “It's at least an even bet that she's at a spa in Cabo with Dan Silver. Wherever she is or isn't, it's going to take a while to find her, so whether I start today, or tomorrow, or the day after, it really doesn't matter.”

“It does to me,” Petra says. “And to Mr. Burke.”

Boone says, “Maybe you didn't understand me when I was talking about the big-”

“I did,” Petra says. “Something is in the process of ‘swelling,’ and certain people with sophomoric sobriquets are, for reasons that evade my comprehension, ‘stoked’ about it.”

Boone stares at her.

Finally he says, as if to a small child, “Well, Pete, let me put it to you in a way you can understand: Some very big waves-the sort of waves that come only about once every other presidential administration-are about to hit that beach out there, for one day only, so all I'm going to be doing for those twenty-four hours is clocking in the green room. Now go back and tell Alan that as soon as the swell passes, I'll find his witness.”

“The world,” Petra says, “doesn't come to a screeching halt on account of ‘big waves’!”

“Yes,” Boone says, “ it does.”

He disappears into the bathroom, shutting the door behind him. The next sound is that of running water. Cheerful looks at Petra and shrugs, as if to say, What are you going to do?