The Gentlemen's Hour (Boone Daniels #2)

“Do I know you?”


“My name’s Boone Daniels,” he says. “We met the other day in your office. You shouldn’t be driving right now.”

“I’ll be fine, thanks.”

“I don’t want to see you get a DUI,” he says. “Hurt yourself, somebody else.”

“Who do you think you are?”

“I’d like to be your friend,” he says.

“I bet you would.” She laughs, but it has no humor. It’s a harsh and bitter sound. Which is a real shame, Boone thinks.

“Friends don’t let friends blah-blah-blah,” he says. “Let me buy you a cup of coffee.”

“The MADD pickup is original, anyway,” she says. She drops her keys back in her purse.

“There’s a Starbucks across the street.”

They walk over to Bucky’s and he orders her a tall iced latte, himself an iced green tea with lemonade. She looks at his drink and laughs, “You some sort of health freak?”

“I’m coffee’d out.”

“Burning it at both ends, huh?”

“You could say that.” Two murder cases—one in which I’m a suspect. Yeah, that’s both ends and more, if you could have more than two ends. Which would make a great interwave topic for the Dawn Patrol—then he remembers that he’s not on the Dawn Patrol anymore, and the guys at the Gentlemen’s Hour wouldn’t go for it. “So how is it, working for Bill?”

“You wanna guess?”

“Kind of a pain?”

“More than kind of. He’s a real son of a bitch.” Then she remembers herself and adds quickly, “You’re not, like, a friend or a business partner, are you?”

“Neither.”

“How do you know Bill?”

“I’m working on his kid’s case.”

“Oh.”

“Oh,” Boone says. “What makes him a son of a bitch?”

“You don’t know?”

“I’m interested in what you think,” Boone says.

“Well, that would make you the first,” Nicole says. “Bill, for instance, isn’t very interested in what I think. Unless I thought with my boobs.”

“Which you don’t.”

“No.” She looks down at her chest and asks, “Hey, what do you guys think?”

She listens for a second and then says, “Nothin’.”

They both laugh. Then Boone starts to push the river a little. “Hey, when I was in with Bill a few days ago, you buzzed him to say something about an appointment he had?”

But you don’t push the river, just like you don’t get out in front of a wave. It’s usually a bad idea. It sure is this time. She looks at him and says, “You bastard.”

“I—”

“Yeah, you want to be my ‘friend.’ Well, f*ck you, friend.”

She slams her cup down and walks out. Boone follows her outside, where she’s steaming back toward her car. “Nicole, come on.”

“F*ck you.”

Boone gets ahead of her. He doesn’t grab her or even touch her, but keeps his hands up as he says, “Was it Phil Schering?”

One look in her eyes and he knows it was. And that she knows that Schering was murdered.

“Get out of my way.”

“Sure.”

Passersby on the street look at them and smile. Lovers’ spat. She has to wait for the light to turn to cross the street, and Boone stands beside her and says, “Nicole, what was Bill doing with Schering?”

“Get away from me.”

The light turns and she crosses the street, Boone right beside her. He stays with her until she gets to her car, and then as she takes her keys from her bag, she looks up at her office and says, “Jesus, if he sees me with you—”

“Let’s get out of here, then.”

She hesitates but gives him the keys. He opens the passenger door for her and she slides in. Boone gets behind the wheel and pulls out. Takes a right onto La Jolla Boulevard, heads north, and asks, “What was Bill doing with Schering?”

“I need this job.”

“You could get a job in any one of a hundred offices, Nicole.”

She shakes her head. “He won’t let me leave—won’t give me a reference.”

“Tell him to go f*ck himself.” Boone turns left onto Torrey Pines.

“You don’t understand,” she says. “He’s blackmailing me to stay.”

“What are you talking about?”

She looks away from him, out the passenger window. “Three years ago . . . I had a drug problem. I took some money from him to buy coke—”

“And now you pay him back or he goes to the police,” Boone says.

Nicole nods.

She probably hasn’t had a raise in those three years either, Boone thinks. Works overtime without compensation, and who knows what other services she performs? And he won’t call the cops—he knows they won’t give a shit about a three-year-old case—but she doesn’t know that, and if she tries to leave, he’ll hang the drug tag around her neck. In the closed world of La Jolla, that will bar every door for her.

Nice.

She’s crying now. In the reflection of the window glass he can see mascara running down her face.

“Nicole,” he says, “someone killed Schering and an innocent man is getting blamed. If you know anything, you need to tell it.”

She shakes her head. “I’ll get you started,” he says. “Phil was what you call a geo-whore. Bill used his services. They were going to meet the other day at the La Jolla sinkhole.”

She nods.

He plays a hunch.

“Does Paradise Homes mean anything to you?”

She keeps looking out the window.

Then she nods again.



117

Monkey sits at his computer at home and looks at Sunny’s Web site.

It’s a satisfying encounter, but all it does in the end is piss him off.

Why should guys like Boone Daniels get all the hot women?

Monkey goes through the checklist of possible answers.

Looks.

Okay, nothing he can do about that. Well, he could shave, get a haircut, brush his teeth, eat something other than processed sugar and pastry items, and hit the personal hygiene section at Sav-on every once in a while, but it isn’t going to make him look like Boone, so f*ck it.

Sexy job.

A brainless PI? Forget it.

Become a surfer.

Involves deep, cold, moving water and physical exertion beyond the . . . never mind.

What else attracts women?

Money.

But you don’t have money, he tells himself, looking around his shithole one-bedroom east of the Lamp, a building that will soon go condo, which he can’t afford.

But you could get money, couldn’t you?

What was Neanderthal Daniels sniffing after?

Paradise Homes?

Monkey wipes the keyboard off, logs into his database, and goes hunting. I may not have looks, a sexy job, a surfboard, or money (yet), but I have access to information, and information is power, and power is money and . . .

An hour later he has his answer.

He picks up the phone, waits for someone to answer, and says, “You don’t know me, a*shole, but my name is Marvin. You have a problem, and I’m the solution.”

Thinking . . . How do you turn Monkey into money?

Just drop the k, baby.

Invigorated, he goes back to Sunny’s Web site.



118

Boone turns on La Jolla Shores Drive, then takes a left on La Playa, then a right, and pulls into the parking lot at La Jolla Shores beach.

Nicole looks at him funny.

“You want to take a walk on the beach?” he asks.

“A walk on the beach?”

“Great time of day for it.” Well, any time is a great time for it. But early evening on a hot August day, with the sky just starting to soften into a gentle pink and the temperature starting to drop: perfection. And dusk is a great time for confession—give your sins to the setting sun and watch them go over the horizon together. Put your past in the past.

So why don’t you do it? he asks himself.

No answer.

She flips down the sunshade and looks at herself in the mirror. “I’m a mess.”

“It’s the beach, nobody cares. Come on.”

“You’re nuts.” But she goes with him.