The Gentlemen's Hour (Boone Daniels #2)

Boone walks to the office, upstairs from the Pacific Surf Shop where Hang Twelve is pretty busy renting boogie boards and fins to tourists. Hang has a family of five on his hands, the kids arguing about which color board they’re going to get. Hang looks real happy, not. Speaking of unhappiness, he warns, “Cheerful’s up there.”


Ben Carruthers, aka Cheerful, is Boone’s friend, a miserable, saturnine millionaire who would qualify for the Gentlemen’s Hour if he didn’t actually loathe the water. He’s lived in Pacific Beach for thirty years and has never actually been to the beach or the Pacific.

“What do you have against the beach?” Boone asked him once.

“It’s sandy.”

“The beach is sand.”

“Exactly,” Cheerful answered. “And I don’t like water either.”

Which pretty much does it, beachwise.

Cheerful is, to say the least, eccentric, and one of his weirder things is a quixotic crusade to stabilize Boone’s finances. The utter futility of this exercise makes him blissfully unhappy, hence the sobriquet. Right now he has his tall frame slouched over an old-style adding machine. His slate-gray hair, styled in a high crew cut, looks like brushed steel.

“Nice of you to make an appearance,” he says, pointedly looking at his watch as Boone comes upstairs.

“Things are slow,” Boone says. He steps out of his boardshorts, kicks off his sandals, and goes into the little bathroom that adjoins the office.

“You think you’re going to speed them up by not coming in till eleven?” Cheerful asks. “You think work just floats around on the water?”

“As a matter of fact . . .” Boone says, turning on the shower. He tells Cheerful about his conversation with Dan, adding with a certain sadistic satisfaction that Nichols is FedExing a substantial retainer.

“You demanded a retainer?” Cheerful asks.

“It was his idea.”

“For a moment,” Cheerful says, “I thought you had learned some fiscal responsibility.”

“Nah.”

Boone steps into the shower just long enough to rinse the salt water off his skin, then gets out and dries off. He doesn’t bother to wrap the towel around himself as he steps back into the office to look for a clean shirt—okay, a reasonably undirty shirt—and a pair of jeans.

Petra Hall is standing there.

Of course she is, Boone thinks.

“Hello, Boone,” she says. “Nice to see you.”

She looks gorgeous, in a cool linen suit, her black hair cut in a retro pageboy, her violet eyes shining.

“Hi, Pete,” Boone says. “Nice to be seen.”

Smooth, he thinks as he retreats into the bathroom.

Idiot.



8

“Business or pleasure?” he asks when he comes back in, Petra having handed him a shirt and jeans.

She gave him his clothes a tad reluctantly because (a) it’s fun to see him embarrassed; and (b) it’s not exactly painful to see him in the buff, Boone Daniels being, well, buff. He’s tall and broad-shouldered, with the lean, long muscles that come from a lifetime of paddling a surfboard and swimming.

“And why can’t business be a pleasure?” she asks in that upper-class British accent that Boone finds alternately aggravating and attractive. Petra Hall is a junior partner at the law firm of Burke, Spitz, and Culver, one of Boone’s steadier clients. She got her good looks and petite frame from her American mother, her accent and attitude from her British dad.

“Because it usually isn’t,” Boone answers, feeling for some reason that he wants to argue with her.

“Then you really should find a new line of work,” she says, “one that you can enjoy. In the meantime . . .”

She hands him the slim file that was tucked under her arm. Boone nudges a copy of Surfer magazine off the cluttered desk to make a little room, sets the file down, and opens it. A deep red flush comes over his cheeks as he shuts the file, glares at her, and says, “No.”

“What does that mean?” Petra asks.

“It means no,” Boone says. He’s quiet for a second and then says, “I can’t believe Alan is taking this case.”

Petra says, “Everyone has the right to a defense.”

Boone points down at the file. “Not him.”

“Everyone.”

“Not him.”

Boone glares at her again, then slides his feet into a well-worn pair of Reef sandals and walks out.

Petra and Cheerful listen to him pound down the stairs.

“Actually,” she says, “that didn’t go as badly as I anticipated.”

Petra had known before she asked that the Corey Blasingame case was deeply hurtful to Boone, that it put into doubt everything he believed in, everything he’d built his life upon.



9

Kelly Kuhio was a freaking legend.

No—K2 was a freaking legend.

Build a surfing pantheon? KK’s in it. Carve a Mount Surfers’ Rushmore? You’re going to be blasting Kelly’s face into that rock. Just make a list of the all-time good guys who’ve ever ridden a board? Kelly Kuhio is in your Top Ten.

Nobody who ever met Kelly Kuhio did anything but like and respect him, he was that kind of dude. Soft-spoken, understated, ultimate cool, Kelly had a way of making people want to be better than they were, and a lot of guys on the Gentlemen’s Hour could tell stories about how they went out and did just that.

Kelly was the epitome of a bygone era.

The time of the Gentleman Surfer.

As a kid, Boone literally sat at his feet, because K2 was a good friend of Boone’s mom and dad, both of them well-known surfers both in San Diego and K2’s native Kauai. So K2—“Uncle K” to Boone—would come to the house and talk story, and Boone just kept his piehole shut and his ears open.

Stories? Are you kidding me? Out of the mouth of Kelly Kuhio? Just look at the man’s life. Born in Honolulu, K2 was the Hawaiian state surfing champion at age thirteen. That’s thirteen, Jack, an age when most gremmies are only champs at . . . well, it ain’t surfing.

And Kelly wasn’t some dumb, mutant muscle freak, either. Actually he was slight of build and smart, went to Punahou School on a scholarship and was 4.0. After school he went up to the North Shore, because that’s where the waves were, and it was K2 who figured out how to shape a board that could survive the wicked hollow tubes up there. K2 became known as “Mister Pipeline,” winning the Masters so often they practically put his name on it.

Then he got bored with that and started traveling.

Dig, it was K2 who first explored Indonesia, K2 who found that great left-hand point break that eventually became G-Land. Should have been K-Land, except Kelly was too modest to hang his tag on it. But now all the boys who make the pilgrimage to Indo on the Unreconstructed Hippie Surf Safari are following in the footsteps of K2, whether they know it or not.

When Laird and Kalama and the rest of the Strapped Crew started to figure out the big-wave, tow-in thing, they went to K2 to advise them how to shape their boards. Kelly enthusiastically helped them but didn’t go out in the sixty-footers himself. In his forties then, he knew that was a young man’s game and K2 was too cool to try to desperately hang on to his youth. He had nothing to prove.

When Kelly freaking Kuhio decided to move to California it was a big deal. He came at the behest of the surf clothing companies to promote their products, and then he stayed. Did a few small parts in films, made public appearances, was basically just being K2. He liked SoCal, he dug the San Diego vibe, he just hung out.

The boys couldn’t believe it. They’d be on the beach and there was K2 out there, cutting his elegant lines, making it look so easy, so casual. And he’d invite you out there to surf with him—“Come on out, brother, the water is fine, plenty of room for everyone”—and give you little tips if you were open to them. (He shifted Sunny’s stance by three inches, and it made all the difference.) K2 was all about the aloha, the community, the peace.

K2 was a Buddhist since his early days hanging out with the Japanese community in Honolulu. A serious, two-meditation-sessions-a-day, lotus-position Buddhist, but he never shoved it at you. K2 never shoved anything at anybody, you just looked at him and learned, and it was K2 who pointed Sunny toward Buddhism and probably never knew it. She just admired his energy, his presence, and wanted it for herself.