The Gentlemen's Hour (Boone Daniels #2)

“Good. Neither do I.”


So he keeps kissing her ear, and she starts to kiss his neck, and Boone feels like he’s happily drowning in her perfume and she doesn’t stop him when he reaches down and pulls the knot on her thick terry-cloth robe, and it slides open and he feels the smooth satin and her flat stomach and starts kissing his way down her chest when he hears her say, “Kitchen-counter sex.”

“Uhhhh . . .”

“I don’t want our first time to be kitchen-counter sex,” she says, kissing along his collarbone. “Can we go to the bedroom, please?”

Oh, yeah, Boone thinks, we can go to the bedroom, please. We can totally, absolutely go to the bedroom, please. He lifts her off the counter. If he’d tried to lift Sunny in anything but a fireman’s carry, he’d be on the way to the e room, but Petra is petite, light as air, as he swings her off the counter and walks toward the living room.

“Are you going to carry me into the bedroom?” she asks, laughing.

“Uhhh . . . yeah.”

“It’s a tad Neanderthal, isn’t it?”

He pushes the bedroom door open with his foot. “You don’t approve.”

“No, I approve.”

He sets her on the bed and lies on top of her. Her negligee rides up on her thighs and he feels her against him. So does she, because she murmurs, “Hmmm, nice,” and reaches down and fumbles with his belt. He lifts his hips to give her an easier time and she gets his belt loose and then pushes his jeans over his hips and they’re kissing again, she darting just the tip of her tongue in and out of his mouth as she feels for him, finds him, and—

The phone rings.

“Ignore it,” he says.

“I am.”

They both try to ignore it as it jangles three times, her crisp British tone on the answering machine announces that she can’t come to the phone just now but please leave a message, and Alan Burke’s voice comes over the speaker: “Petra! I’m at the police station. Get your ass out of bed and get it down here. Now.”

She tries to go back to kissing Boone, but it doesn’t work and she sighs and says, “I have to go.”

“No, you don’t,” he says, but it’s a feeble try at best because they both know the moment is over. Some waves are like that—they build and build and you think you’re in for the ride of your life and then they just . . . flatten.

“Wavus interruptus” is what Dave calls it.

“Yes, I do,” she says.

“Yes, you do,” Boone says, rolling off her.

“I am so sorry.”

“Nothing to be sorry about.”

“For me as well, I mean.”

She gets up, slides open a closet door, and starts taking down clothes. Then she disappears into the bathroom, to emerge a few minutes later the Petra Hall that he’s familiar with—cool, professional, efficient.

“Do I look,” she asks, “as if I just got up from a bed of passion?”

“Only to me,” Boone says.

“That was the perfect response,” she says. “Listen, could I have . . . what do they call it in baseball games?”

“A rain check.”

“One of those?”

“Absolutely.”

“It was very nice,” she says. “What we did, as far as we got.”

“It was great.”

He gets up and walks to her car in the subterranean garage. A quick kiss on the lips and she drives off to join the campaign to save Dan Nichols.

I hate matrimonial, Boone thinks.



93

“I like Daniels for it,” Harrington says after they’ve kicked the Nicholses loose with the usual warnings about staying available.

“His AA test came up negative,” Johnny says.

“So what?” Harrington says. “They come up with a lot of false negatives.”

Harrington walks him through it. First, they have Daniels at the scene, while they don’t have Nichols. Second, rich people rarely, if ever, do their own killing—they hire other people to do it for them. Third, Daniels is just the kind of low-life, perpetually broke surf bum who would do something like this.

“He bird-dogs Schering for Nichols,” Harrington says. “Then Nichols says there’s money in it for him if he finishes the job. Shit, it was probably Daniels who made the offer. As a former cop—which I’m ashamed to say—Daniels knows how to use a gun. But he’s such a dumb a*shole he drives his own vehicle to the scene. What we do now is squeeze his balls into a confession, then get the DA to offer him a reduced sentence to roll on Nichols. Job done, we go get breakfast, home to bed.”

But Johnny doesn’t like Boone for it. Pissed off as he is about Boone jumping into the Corey Blasingame wave, he doesn’t buy Boone as a killer. Neither should Harrington. Hell, their whole beef started when Boone refused to help him tune up a child kidnapping suspect and the guy walked.

Boone is a lot of things—overly laid-back, irresponsible, immature—but a killer for hire? Granted, Boone always needs money, but this? No way, nohow. He’s probably kicking himself for his unintentional role in Schering’s death.

No, if Nichols hired this out, he found someone other than Boone Daniels.

Okay, so what was Boone doing at Schering’s? Obviously, he tracked Donna Nichols there. But the neighbor’s statement had Boone parked right outside the house, and that’s bad technique. Boone wouldn’t go in that close unless . . .

. . . he needed proximity.

For what?

Johnny waits for Harrington to sign off the shift, then gets his own car and drives to Crystal Pier.



94

“Where is it?” Johnny asks him.

“Where’s what?” Boone asks.

He’s half asleep, having just woken up from a very short night in time to go out on the Dawn Patrol, when the doorbell rings and it’s Johnny Banzai. Boone leaves the door open and walks into the kitchen to put the water on for a badly needed pot of coffee.

Johnny follows him in.

“The tape,” Johnny says. “You have video or audio of Donna Nichols getting horizontal with the late Phil Schering.”

“I do?” Boone asks. He pours kona beans into the grinder and the whir drowns out Johnny’s response, making him say it again.

“You parked out in front of Schering’s house with a camera or a sound-capturing device and you made a tape,” Johnny repeats. “I’m hoping it’s a video so it has a time track on it.”

“Sorry,” Boone says. “Audio only.”

“Goddamnit,” Johnny says. “Anyway, I want it.”

“Why?” Boone asks. “The boys at the house want a dirty chuckle?”

“You know why.”

Boone leans against the counter and looks out the window at the ocean, barely lit by the lamps on the pier. “There’s no surf again today. August blows. Look, you don’t need the tape. You already know that she had sex with Schering. If you don’t already know, I’ll tell you—she had sex with Schering. There’s nothing on that tape that’s going to help you, J.”

“They might have said something.”

“They didn’t.”

“Nichols hear the tape?”

Boone shakes his head.

“You were there from when to when?”

“I wasn’t there last night, J,” Boone says.

“The neighbor says differently.”

Boone shrugs. “The neighbor is mixed up. I was there the night before. All night. I left in the morning when Schering went to work.”

“Did you go back to Schering’s last night?”

“One last time,” Boone says. “I was here until you and F*ckwad came by to visit.”

The pot whistles. Boone pours a little water on the coffee, waits a few seconds, then pours the rest. He doesn’t wait the recommended four minutes, but presses the plunger down and pours himself a cup.

Johnny asks, “Do you have anyone who can put you here before we came?”

Boone shakes his head, then says, “I talked with Sunny on the phone.”

“Landline or cell?”

“Since when do I have a landline?”

“Yeah, I forgot,” Johnny said. So Boone’s phone would show a record of him talking to Sunny, but wouldn’t say where he was. “What time did you talk to her?”

“I dunno. After nine.”