The Gentlemen's Hour (Boone Daniels #2)

Even with the jump-in rule.

Boone and Johnny established the jump-in rule shortly after Boone got his PI card and they realized that their lines were going to clash from time to time. So the rule is just an understanding that their business lives are sometimes going to conflict with their friendship—that sometimes one of them is going to have to jump in on the other guy’s wave, and it’s nothing personal.

Yeah, but . . .

This threatens to get real personal, because for Boone to do his job he’s going to have to attack Johnny’s work, his professional ethics. Which is not something you do to a friend and, no mistake, Boone and Johnny Banzai are friends.

They’ve been boys since they were freshmen law enforcement majors at San Diego State. In those days, Johnny used to surf down in Ocean Beach, and it was Boone who told him that he should check out PB Pier, Boone who made sure that he didn’t catch any locie aggro as a newbie. Yeah, that didn’t take long—when the PB boys saw Johnny shred that wave like he was born in it, when they caught how cool a guy he was, they took him right in.

Yeah, Boone and JB are friends, as in . . .

Boone was the best man at Johnny’s wedding (and studied for weeks to learn enough Japanese to properly greet Johnny’s grandparents). As in . . .

If Johnny and his wife both had to work a weekend day, they’d leave their boys with Boone and Dave at the beach and never give it a second thought because they knew that Boone and Dave would die before they’d let anything happen to those kids. As in . . .

One of those kids, the younger son, is named James Boone Kodani. As in . . . The normally ultrapeaceful Boone clocked some clown who called Johnny a “slant” right here in this same Sundowner. As in . . .

When Boone had his problems over the Rain Sweeny case, when he was a pariah on the force, it was J Banzai—and only J Banzai—who stood by him, who’d be seen talking to him, who’d sit down and have lunch with him. And although Boone never knew it, after he pulled the pin, it was Johnny B who whipped out his judo and put an epic ass-kicking on three—count them, three—cops who bad-mouthed Boone in the locker room. As in . . .

JB came to visit Boone in his crib almost every day during Boone’s long months of lying around feeling sorry for himself. It was JB who kicked his ass to get off the sofa, JB who commiserated with him when Sunny couldn’t stand it anymore and threw him out, Johnny Banzai who told him, “Get back to the ocean, bro. Get back in the water.” As in . . .

They’re friends.

So this ain’t gonna be fun.



20

Boone ponders this as he gets into the Deuce to meet Pete over at the central jail downtown. That he’s going to have to take a chunk out of one of his oldest friends to save garbage like Corey Blasingame.

And classic Johnny to catch the biggest case in San Dog and not mention it. Then again, JB usually keeps his cards pretty close to his chest where his cases are concerned, especially after Boone left the police force. They can talk shit out on the lineup, but there’s a lot of shit they can’t talk anymore.

The Deuce is a used Dodge van, the replacement for the legendary Boonemobile, which went out in a Viking funeral last April.

“This is your chance, you know,” Petra had pointed out to him, “to own a real, grown-up sort of car.”

Not really—the insurance payment on the Boonemobile had been exactly zero, Boone having been honest about the fact that he set the van on fire himself and also pushed it off the edge of a cliff. So there wasn’t a lot of cash to go out and buy “a real, grown-up sort of car,” not that Boone wanted one. He wanted, and bought, another old van that he could fit his stuff in. A vehicle that cannot carry a surfboard is a sculpture.

“Then,” Petra said, graciously yielding to the inevitable, “this is your chance to own a vehicle that does not have a sophomoric name.”

“I didn’t name the Boonemobile,” Boone said a little defensively. “Other people did.”

The other people—Dave, Tide, Hang, Johnny, and most of the Greater San Diego surfing community—inevitably called the “new” van Boonemobile II, after its iconic predecessor. The really annoying thing for Petra was that the replacement van acquired not one, but two monikers, because Boonemobile II was too long; so the nickname got a nickname of its own: “Deuce.”

“You know,” Johnny said, “guys who are ‘the third’ get tagged ‘Trey.’ Let’s call Boone’s second van ‘Deuce.’”

So Deuce it was.

She’s waiting in the parking lot when he gets there.

“Your boy is driftwood,” Boone says.

Washed up on the beach.

“I can’t allow myself to think that way,” Petra answers.

“How are you going to get around the confession?” Boone asks. Some waves you don’t get around, over, or under. They just crush you. Out.

Petra shrugs. “Confusion? Coercion? A cop putting ideas into his head? That sort of thing does happen.”

“Not with John Kodani,” Boone says.

JB will definitely play hardball and he doesn’t always throw straight down the middle. No, Johnny hurls some filthy junk—curveball, slider, even the occasional knuckleball—but he’s always going to catch the edge of the plate. Banzai wouldn’t just rear back and throw a spitter at someone’s head—convince some stupid kid that he did something he didn’t.

“The first thing we have to do,” she says, ignoring the five-hundred-pound gorilla, “is to demonstrate that the Rockpile Crew isn’t a ‘gang.’ The ‘special circumstances’ on the first-degree charge hinge on the allegation of gang activity.”

“The Rockpile Crew is a gang,” Boone says.

“Mere association and group self-identification do not meet the legal threshold required of a ‘gang,’” she answers. “For instance, is the Dawn Patrol a gang?”

“Sort of.”

“The ‘gang’ has to exist for the furtherance of criminal activity,” she says. “I don’t think that the Dawn Patrol engages in organized criminal activity.”

Clearly, Boone thinks, she’s never seen the Dawn Patrol hit a lunch buffet. Okay, the ‘organized’ thing is a stretch.

“Like murder?” he asks.

“Only,” she insists, “if the murder is a direct consequence of, and/or in furtherance of, the stated criminal activity. It can’t be merely coincidental.”

Boone wonders how Kelly’s loved ones might feel about his murder being “merely coincidental,” but keeps the thought to himself. “So we need to find out if the Rockpile Crew was involved in anything other than the violent defense of its turf—say, drug dealing or something like that.”

“Precisely,” she says. “Although I suppose it would be prudent to find out if any of these gangs of ‘locies’—is that what you call them?—”

“Okay.”

“—derive any financial profit from the defense of said turf,” she says. “For instance, if they’re practicing extortion, or charging ‘taxes’ for the use of the water, that would constitute a ‘gang’ under the legal interpretation.”

So, Boone thinks, if the Rockpile Crew says “You can’t surf here” and enforce it, they’re not a gang. If they say, “You can’t surf here unless you give us twenty bucks” and enforce that, they are. You gotta love the law.

What about the big five-star hotel chains that are buying up the coastline, and do everything they can to keep the public from getting access to “their” beaches? Are they a gang under the law?

Oughta be.

Bet they’re not.

He asks, “What does Corey say about it?”

“I don’t know,” she says. “Let’s go ask him.”

To meet Corey is to take an instant dislike to him.

In the interest of efficiency.