The Gentlemen's Hour (Boone Daniels #2)

Now Boone and Dave swim over to the cave where they think they’ll have the best luck. Boone spits into his mask, swishes some water around the glass, and fits it snugly onto his face. Then he lays out, swims around for a second, and dives.

They call it free diving because you’re free of most equipment—crucially, air tanks and regulators. What you’re free to do is hold your breath for as long as you can and get as deep as you can, leaving yourself with enough reserve in your lungs to make it back up. Both Boone and Dave are certified scuba divers, and sometimes do that, but on a summer evening it’s easier to just jump in and go.

Boone flicks on his lamp and dives down toward the mouth of a narrow cave. He moves his head to shine the light around but doesn’t see anything but tiny fish, so he comes back up, grabs a breath, and dives again.

He spots Dave about fifty feet away, treading above a small crack in a reef. You want to stay close enough for visual contact but far enough away for safety; the last thing you want is to shoot your buddy with a spear.

Some movement catches Boone’s eye. Turning back to a crack in an underwater rock, he sees a “swish” disappear into it, leaving a roil of bubbles that shine in the lantern light. Boone swims down to the crack and feels it. It’s narrow, but wide enough, and he turns sideways and pushes himself through.

The crack opens into an underwater chamber, and Boone sees the yellowtail tuna below him, flipping its tail back and forth, motoring away. Boone is almost out of breath—he feels that tightness in his chest and the slight physical panic that always comes with running out of air—but he relaxes and pushes through it, diving down closer to the tuna. He raises the speargun to his shoulder and squeezes the trigger. The spear shoots out and strikes the fish behind the gills. The tuna thrashes violently for a moment, then is still, as a cloud of blood billows into the water. Boone pulls in the cord and brings the fish closer to his body.

Time to get going.

Boone turns and heads up toward the narrow chamber.

Except he can’t find it.

A slight problem.

It was perfectly obvious from above, but it must look different from below and in poor light, and as he gropes his way around the chamber for an opening he feels really stupid. This would be a bad, dumb way to go out, he thinks, trying to keep his movements steady and unhurried, fighting the physical reflex to hurry.

But he can’t see it and he can’t feel it.

So he listens for it.

Small waves are coming into the cove, against the cliffs, and the water will go out the chamber and make a sound. He stops still and listens, and then he hears a faint whooshing sound and heads toward it.

Then he sees the light.

Not the light that they say you see before you go to heaven, but Dave’s lantern shining into the chamber from the other side.

Why you dive with a buddy.

Especially a buddy like Dave the Love God.

These guys are tight, they’ve hung together since grade school, ditching classes through junior high and high school to go surfing, diving or just roaming the beach. It was like they didn’t have separate houses—if Boone was at Dave’s at suppertime, that’s where he ate; if Dave was at Boone’s at night, that’s where he crashed. They’d sit up half the night anyway, playing video games, watching surf videos, talking about their heroes—and, yeah, one of those was Kelly Kuhio.

Some of the old guys on the Gentlemen’s Hour called them the “Siamese Idiots,” a double dose of gremmie obnoxiousness joined at the hip. (Yeah, but those men looked out for them, made sure that their stupidity didn’t cost them their lives, made sure they never crossed the line.)

Boone and Dave pooled their cash to buy that first van, used it to go cruising the coast together looking for the best waves, and took turns on a Friday/Saturday-night rotation system for dates. The van died a natural death after two years (Johnny B opined that its suspension just gave up the will to live), and the boys sold it for scrap and used the money to buy scuba gear.

Diving, surfing, hogueing, chasing girls. Long days on the beach, long nights on the beach, it builds a friendship. You’re in the ocean with a guy, you learn to trust that guy, trust his character and his capabilities. You know he’s not going to jump your wave or do something kooky that would get you hurt or even killed. And you know—you know—that if you’re ever lost in the dark, deep water, that guy is coming to look for you, no matter what.

So Dave’s down there with a lantern, showing him the way up and out.

Boone swims toward the light, then sees the crack and squeezes through, pulling his catch behind him. Then he plunges up to the surface and gets a deep breath of beautiful air.

Dave comes up beside him.

“Nice catch.”

“Thanks.”

“You’re an idiot.”

“It’s been said.”

“Accurately,” Dave says. “We should head in.”

Because there’s blood in the water, and if there’s anything more attractive to a shark than a sea lion, it’s blood. If any sharks are within a hundred-yard radius, they’ll be coming. Best to be onshore when they do.

“Let me catch a little more air,” Boone says.

“Weak unit.”

Again, accurate, Boone thinks. He takes in a couple more lungfuls and then they swim to shore and climb out on a shelf of rock.

“Beautiful night,” Dave says.

Too true.



26

The three decapitated bodies lie in a drainage ditch.

Johnny Banzai shines a flashlight on them, fights off the urge to vomit, and slides down into the ditch. From the relative lack of blood he can tell that the men were killed somewhere else and dumped out here to be seen.

What happens to people who f*ck with Don Cruz Iglesias.

Steve Harrington slaps the back of his hand to his forehead and says with a moan, “?Ohhh, mi cabeza!”

Funny guy, Harrington.

Johnny checks one of the dead men’s wrists for tattoos and finds just what he expected—a tattoo depicting a skull with wings coming out of each side. Los ángeles Muertos, the Death Angels, are an old-line Barrio Logan street gang who’ve been revived by hooking up with the Ortega drug cartel across the border. The Criminal Intelligence guys had given Homicide a heads up that the Ortegas had taken a shot at Cruz Iglesias yesterday and missed.

The decapitations are his response, Johnny thinks.

“Any ID on the Juan Does?” Harrington asks.

“Death Angels.”

“Well, they sure are now.”

Johnny’s no particular lover of gangbangers, but at the same time he’s not happy that the cartels’ war for Baja has spilled over into San Diego and threatens to start a full-blown gang war like they haven’t seen since the nineties. The Ortegas recruited the Death Angels, Iglesias signed up Los Ni?os Locos, the Crazy Boys, and now it won’t be long before stupid kids and innocent bystanders start getting killed. So he’d just as soon the Mexican cartels kept their shit in Mexico.

The border, he thinks.

What border?

“I guess we’re going to have to start looking for the heads,” Harrington says.

Johnny says, “My guess is that they’re in dry ice and on their way to Luis Ortega in a UPS package.”

“What Brown can do for you.”

A gory, media-feeding triple is not what I need right now, Johnny thinks. Summer is the busy homicide season in San Diego. The heat shortens emotional fuses and then lights them. What would be arguments in the autumn become fights in the summer. What would have been simple assaults become murders. Johnny has a fatal stabbing over a disputed bottle of beer, a drive-by that happened after an argument at a taco stand, and a domestic killing that occurred in an apartment after the air-conditioning broke down.

Then there’s the Blasingame case headed for trial and Mary Lou all over his ass to make sure his “ducks are in a row.” Whose f*cking ducks are ever in a row, anyway? Five eyewitnesses and little Corey clinging to his strong, silent type routine, Mary Lou should just relax. Then again, it’s not Mary Lou’s nature to relax.