The Gentlemen's Hour

49

Boone goes home.

Pulls a yellowtail steak out of the fridge, gets it ready, and tosses it on the grill.

Sunny always used to bust him for his ability to eat the same thing over and over again, day after day, but Boone never got what the problem was. His logic was simple: if something is good on Tuesday, why isn’t it good on Wednesday? All that’s changed is the day, not the food.

“But what about variety?” Sunny pressed.

“Overrated,” Boone answered. “We surf every day, don’t we?”

“Yeah, but we change up the place sometimes.”

He steps outside, turns the fish over, and sees High Tide coming up the pier. Boone goes outside to meet him.

“Big man,” Boone says. “S’up?”

“We need to talk.”

Boone unlocks his door and says, “Come on in.”

He’s known Tide since college days, when the big man was a star lineman at SDSU, headed for the pros. He was there to pick him back up when a knee injury ended that career. Boone didn’t know him in his gangbanging days, when Tide was the lord of the Samoan gangs in O’Side, before he found Jesus and gave all that up. He’s heard the stories, though—not from Tide but from other people.

They go into Boone’s. Tide gently lets himself down on the sofa.

“You want anything?” Boone asks.

Tide shakes his big head. “I’m good.”

Boone sits in a chair across from him. “What’s up?”

High Tide is usually a pretty funny guy. Not now. Now he’s dead serious. “You’re on the wrong side of this, Boone.”

“The Blasingame case.”

“See, we don’t look at it as ‘the Blasingame case,’” Tide says. “We look at it as the ‘Kuhio murder.’”

“‘We’ being the island community?” Bundling together the Hawaiians, Samoans, Fijians, and Tongans who have moved in greater numbers to California.

Tide nods. “We fight among ourselves, but when an outsider attacks the

calabash

, the community, we bond together.”

“I get that.”

“No,” Tide says, “if you got that, you wouldn’t be lining up on the other side. We’re talking about Kelly Kuhio . . . K2. You know how many islanders the kids have to look up to? A few football players, a couple of surfers. You remember when the Samoan gangs were going at each other?”

“Sure.”

“K2 went street to street, block to block, with me,” Tide says. “He put himself on the line to bring the peace.”

“He was a hero, Tide, I’m not arguing that.”

Tide looks bewildered. “Then—”

“They’re out to lynch that kid,” Boone says. “It’s not right.”

“Let the system work it out.”

“That’s what I’m doing.”

“

Without

you,” Tide says. “Burke can hire any PI he wants. It doesn’t have to be you. I’m telling you, it’s personally hurtful to me that you took this case. I’m asking you, as your friend, to step out of it.”

High Tide is not only a friend, but also one of the most fundamentally decent people whom Boone has ever known. He’s a man who rebuilt his life—not once, but twice—a family man whose view of family extends to his whole community. He’s gone back and worked with the gangs he used to lead in fights, he’s created peace and a little hope. An intelligent, sensitive man who wouldn’t have come with this request unless he’d given it a lot of thought.

But he’s wrong, Boone thinks. Every lawyer, every investigator in town, could take a pass on this case on the same basis, and even the Coreys of the world—especially the Coreys of the world—need help. If Kelly taught us anything, he taught us that.

“I’m sorry, Joshua, I can’t do that.”

Tide gets up.

Boone says, “We’re still friends, right?”

“I don’t know, B,” Tide says. “I’ll have to think about that.”

First Johnny, now Tide, Boone thinks after the big man has left. How many friendships do I have to put on the line for piece-of-shit Corey Blasingame?

Then he smells his fish burning.

He runs outside but the tuna has already gone Cajun style on him. He brings it back in, lays it in a tortilla with the red onion, finds some hot sauce in the fridge, pours it all over the fish, and then scarfs down the whole mess in a few big bites.

Food is food.

Then he calls Pete.

She’s still at the office, of course.

You don’t make partner working nine to five, or even nine to nine.

“Hall,” she says.

“Daniels.”

“Hi, Boone, what’s up?”

He fills her in on his day looking for the soul of Corey Blasingame, leaving out his fight at the dojo, Red Eddie’s threat, and the fact that he’s pissing off half his friends. There’d be time to tell her about that later.

When he’s finished his account she says, “There’s really not a lot there we can use. The father is an alternately overbearing and neglectful horror show, and Corey was a mediocre surfer and a poor martial artist. Unfortunately, not poor enough. I think it does knock the ‘gang’ thing back a bit, though.”

“There is no Rockpile ‘gang’ outside the four of them,” Boone says. “And their only criminal activity seems to be going around trying to start fights.”

Yeah, except, he thinks. There’s always a freaking “except,” isn’t there? The except in this case being the two points of contact. Corey and the other Mouseketeers surf at Rockpile, a spot notorious for its localism, and the sheriff there is Mike Boyd. Corey and the boys trained at Boyd’s gym, where Corey learned the punch that killed Kelly Kuhio. The freaking Superman Punch.

“. . . a late dinner or something?” she’s saying.

“Uhh, Pete, yeah, I’d like to, but I have to work.”

“The

w

word?” she asks. “From the self-proclaimed surf bum?”

She keeps it light, but he can hear that she doesn’t quite believe him, thinks it’s payback from last night.

“Yeah, you never know, huh?” Boone says. “But listen, another night . . .”

“Another night. Well, I won’t keep you.”

He punches out.