The Gentlemen's Hour

5

In the middle of August, on a ferociously hot day, the man wears a seersucker suit, white shirt, and tie. His one concession to the potentially harmful effects of the strong sun on his pale skin is a straw hat.

Jones just believes that is how a gentleman dresses.

He strolls the boardwalk along Pacific Beach and watches as two surfers walk in, their boards tucked under their arms alongside their hips.

But Jones’s mind is not on them, it is on pleasure.

He’s reveling in a memory from the previous day, of gently, slowly, and repeatedly swinging a bamboo stick into a man’s shins. The man was suspended by the wrists from a ceiling pipe, and he swayed slightly with each blow.

A less subtle interrogator might have swung the stick harder, shattering bone, but Jones prides himself on his subtlety, patience, and creativity. A broken shin is agonizing but hurts only once, albeit for quite some time. The repetitive taps grew increasingly painful and the anticipation of the ensuing tap was mentally excruciating.

The man, an accountant, told Jones everything that he knew after a mere twenty strokes.

The next three hundred blows were for pleasure—Jones’s, not the accountant’s—and to express their common employer’s displeasure at the state of business. Don Iglesias, patron of the Baja Cartel, does not like to lose money, especially on foolishness, and he hired Jones to find out the real cause of said loss and to punish those responsible.

It will be many months before the accountant walks without a wince. And Don Iglesias now knows that the origin of his losses is not in Tijuana, where the beating took place, but here in sunny San Diego.

Jones goes in search of an ice cream, which sounds very pleasant.