The Gentlemen's Hour (Boone Daniels #2)

61

It’s good being Donna Nichols.

What Boone thinks after he drives over to the Nichols neighborhood south of La Jolla, parks a couple of blocks away from the house, and waits with a paper-wrapped breakfast burrito, a go-cup of coffee, and his laptop computer.

Donna comes out of the house a little after ten-thirty. She’s hot, no question about it, her blond hair done in a ponytail under a white visor, and her tight frame tucked into a white sleeveless blouse and designer jeans. Boone watches her little red icon ping—he’s set it for one-second intervals—on his laptop screen and makes a correct assumption about where she’s headed: an upscale mall called Fashion Valley.

Boone gets there first and hangs out around a central point. Sure enough, Donna shows up a few minutes later. He watches her go into Vertigo, an expensive spa, then goes back out to the parking lot, finds her car, and parks the Deuce on the other side, where he can still watch, and sits. Now he remembers why he hates any kind of surveillance work—it’s boring as hell, especially on an August morning when it’s already getting hot. He rolls the window down on the van, sits back, and tries to grab some sleep.

Yeah, good luck with that.

He’s too pissed off to sleep.

What, I’m this subterranean well of rage threatening to go off like a volcano or something? Boone asks himself. I’m this earthquake waiting to happen? Just because I think it’s a shitty thing that a racist creep decides to kill someone and won’t end up paying the full tab? Yeah, well, he may not in the court system, but in the Red Eddie system he’s going to get the max, and there won’t be twenty years of appeals and people doing candlelight vigils, either.

So chill, he tells himself. All this happy legalistic horseshit is irrelevant—“moot,” as they might say, a card game trumped by Eddie’s willingness to come in and play Fifty-two Pickup. But are you happy about that? Boone asks himself. Are you a vigilante now? Then he realizes that it isn’t his own voice he’s hearing, it’s K2’s, asking those gentle questions, doing his Socratic Buddha thing.

Boone doesn’t want to hear it right now, so instead he gets mad at Pete all over again. Where the hell does she get off fronting me with Rain Sweeny? And on the topic of what the hell, what the hell was Sunny doing telling her about it? Is this some sort of sistuh-chick thing, ganging up on the guy? Get him to talk about his feelings?

Donna’s in the spa for a little over an hour and comes out looking even better, if that’s possible. Some kind of new makeup look or skin treatment or something. He waits for her to pull out of the lot and then watches the screen to see where she’s headed.

Downtown.

She heads south on the 163, gets off on Park Boulevard, and turns left into Balboa Park. Slowly wends her way around the narrow, curving streets and then parks in the lot just south of the Spreckels Amphitheater.

Boone hits the gas to catch up and pulls into a slot just in time to see her walking north up the Prado, the main street in Balboa Park. Following her up past the Zen garden to the Prado restaurant, where she meets three other women and goes inside.

Ladies who lunch, Boone thinks. He buys a newspaper, finds a bench over near the Botanical Garden across the street, and waits. He’s sweaty and hungry, so he breaks the monotony by walking back to a kiosk outside the Prado and buying a pretzel and a bottle of mango juice, then goes back and sits down, just another unemployed slacker killing an afternoon in Balboa Park.



62

Mary Lou Baker is skippy.

But then again, she always is.

The happy warrior.

Now she looks across the table at Alan Burke and says, “Oh, please, Alan. Save the cat-with-the-canary cryptic smile for some young pup who’s impressed with your résumé. I have your client’s confession, I have five witnesses, I have the medical examiner’s report that Kelly’s death was consistent with a severe blow to the head. You have . . . let me think . . . right, that would be nothing.”

Alan maintains the feline smile, if only to get her more jacked up. “Mary Lou,” he says as if addressing a first-year law student in class, “I’ll get the ME to testify that the severe blow to the head could have come from striking the curb. I’ll get three of your witnesses to admit that they pled to reduced charges in exchange for their testimony. As for the so-called confession, come on, ML, you might as well tear it up right now and put it into the office john, because that’s about all it’s good for.”

“Detective Sergeant Kodani has a sterling reputation—”

“Not when I’m done with him,” Alan says.

“Nice,” Mary Lou answers. She leans back in her chair, puts her hands behind her head, and says, “We’ll drop ‘special circumstances.’”

“The judge will drop the ‘special’ before we go to motions,” Alan says.

“You’re going to roll the dice on that?”

“Seven come eleven.”

Mary Lou laughs. “Okay, what do you want?”

“You go manslaughter, we have something to talk about.”

Mary Lou jumps out of the chair, throws her hands up into the air, and says, “What do I look like to you . . . Santa Claus?! Christmas comes in August now?! Look, we’re wasting our time here. Let’s just go to trial, let the jury hear the case and hand your client life without parole because you want to come in here and joke around.”

Alan looks wide-eyed and innocent. “We can certainly go in front of a jury, Mary Lou. It would be an honor and a pleasure to try a case with you. And no one is going to blame you for an acquittal. You were handcuffed by a shoddy investigation and a rush to judgment, what could you do? I’m sure Marcia Clark would—”

“I’d go second degree,” Mary Lou says. “My best and final offer.”

“That’s fifteen to life.”

“Yeah, I’ve read the statute,” she says.

“Sentence recommendation?”

She sits back down. “It would have to be somewhere in the midrange, Alan. I won’t push for max, but I can’t go minimum, I just can’t.”

Alan nods. “He serves ten on sixteen?”

“We’re in the same ballpark.”

“I’ll have to take it to my client,” Alan says.

“Of course.”

Alan stands up and shakes her hand. “Pleasure doing business with you, Mary Lou.”

“Always, Alan.”

The Gentlemen’s Hour.



63

The women finally come out of the restaurant. Kisses on the cheek all around, promises to do this again “sooner,” and then Donna starts walking back toward the parking lot. Boone gives her a good head start, then catches up, passes her, and is in his van waiting when she pulls out of the lot. He gives her a lot of time, watching her progress on the screen as she drives west on Laurel Street through the park, down toward the airport, then gets on the 5 north.

She could be heading home, but she takes the exit for Solana Beach and parks on Cedros Street. Boone is just a couple of minutes behind her as she parks and then walks from store to store on this block of expensive furniture stores. Then she goes into a clothing boutique and spends forty-five minutes. And some money, apparently, because she comes out with a couple of dresses on hangers and goes back to her car.

Now she drives home and pulls into the garage.

Boone sits a block away. Ten minutes later, a car pulls into the driveway. A young man in a tight-fitting black T-shirt, bicycling shorts, and muscles gets out and rings the bell. Donna lets him in.

She wouldn’t, Boone thinks. She wouldn’t have the nerve or the bad taste to do this right in her own home. Doesn’t happen. He takes his binoculars, scopes the license plate, and calls Dan.

“That’s Tony,” Dan says. “Personal trainer.”

“Uhhh, Dan, I know this would be really cliché, but—”