The Gentlemen's Hour (Boone Daniels #2)

One pistol shoved into his face, then the other slammed into the back of his head.

Boone drops to his knees, not out but wobbly. Even with the world tilting he can see that the gangbangers have wrecked his place, gone through it like a hurricane. But he’s too out of it anyway to stop them from wrapping the duct tape around his mouth, then over his eyes. They jerk his arms behind him, wrap more tape around his wrists, and push him to the floor.

He kicks out, but there are at least three of them, and they hold his legs and tape his ankles together, then pick him up and carry him into his bedroom. He feels the air of the open window as they lift him, then push him out.

Into the water.

Into the dark sea.



133

Shut it down.

What Johnny’s lieutenant told him.

His shift commander listened patiently to Johnny’s rendition of Boone’s Paradise Homes story, nodded vigorously at the salient points, whistled appreciatively when Johnny mentioned some of the names allegedly involved, then told him . . .

Shut it down.

Actually, shut it the f*ck down.

“You came in here,” Lieutenant Romero said, “and we talked about baseball. The Pads have no middle relief, I’m glad we agree on that. You left.”

“But—”

“But f*cking nothing, Kodani,” Romero said. “You push on that, you know what pushes back? Weight comes from above, my ambitious friend, and do you know who’s between you and the above? That would be me. Shut it the f*ck down.”

“Burke will pursue it,” Johnny argued, “even if we don’t. One way or the other.”

“Don’t be so sure about that,” the lieutenant said. “Far as I’m concerned, this is one multimillionaire against another. Let them rip each other to shreds and we’ll pick up the pieces. But you don’t, repeat for emphasis, you do not go anywhere near Bill Blasingame. People are going to think you have some kind of hard-on for that family, John.”

So now Johnny is on his way to roust Bill Blasingame.

He finds him at home.

With dirt in his mouth.



134

“We found the bitch.”

Jones sighs. The young gangsters his client provided—what is their collective moniker? the Crazy Boys—are efficient and suitably cold-blooded, but must they always be so vulgar? And vague.

“Which bitch?” he asks into the phone, “given that we are looking for not one, but two, women.”

“The British bitch, no se, Petra.”

“Pick her up,” Jones says. “Bring her to me.”

A woman, he thinks.

And a man.

Conceivably a couple?

The possibilities are tantalizing.



135

Boone feels the water embrace him.

Not scary, not scary at all.

He doesn’t struggle but lets himself sink until he feels the bottom, then uses it to push off. Then he “seals” it, flaps his bound legs back and forth, propelling himself up until he breaks the surface and gets a breath of air.

He kicks gently to keep himself from sinking and listens.

The shore break is behind him.

If anyone could make it to shore blind, with his arms and legs tied, it’s Boone freaking Daniels.

Except . . .

There’s a boat right there where he comes up.

He hears the water hit the hull.

Then he feels a hand grab him by the hair, hold him, and push him back under. But not before he hears the guy say, “Let’s see how long you can hold your breath.”



136

A long time, as it turns out.

A long time, over and over again, as the hand holds Boone down until his lungs are about to explode, then lifts him above the water while Boone gets as much air as he can through his nose, then pushes him down again.

They do several cycles of this before the guy asks, “Where are they?”

Doesn’t wait for an answer before shoving him down again.

When he pulls Boone back up, he asks again, “Where are the records that she gave to you?”

He leans down and rips the tape off Boone’s mouth. “Tell me, and we can stop all this.”

As soon as I do tell, Boone thinks, I’m a dead man, so he shakes his head and opens his mouth to swallow a lungful of air before the guy pushes him down again. Boone struggles and thrashes to shake himself loose of the grip but can’t do it, and then stops, knowing that he’s burning up precious air. So he stays still and tries to relax, knowing that they’ll pull him up before he actually drowns.

They can’t get what they want if I’m dead, he tells himself.

And they don’t know who they’re playing with here.

The Breath-Holding Champion of the Dawn Patrol, that’s who.

We practice for this, a*shole. We go to the bottom, pick up heavy rocks, and walk.

I beat Johnny Banzai . . .

High Tide . . .

Dave the Goddamn Love God . . .

Even Sunny Day . . .

Then his body overrules his mind and his feet start jerking like a hanged man’s and they lift him up again. He gasps for air as Jones says, “You’re being very foolish.”

And pushes him down again.

They say that drowning is a peaceful death.



137

They’d tortured him.

Blasingame is duct-taped to a chair by the wrists and ankles. The fingers of his neatly severed hands, laying on the floor, are all broken. So are the bones in his feet.

His dead eyes are wide with horror and pain.

Johnny can’t tell if they’d stuffed the dirt in his mouth before or after planting the two bullets in his forehead, but maybe the ME will be able to establish that.

Two victims shot in the forehead, he thinks. Unusual for a pro, who would usually shoot his marks in the back of the head. But this one was no crime of passion, it was a professional job. So maybe this pro is a sicko—likes to see the look on the victim’s face before he dies.

The dirt is odd, though. He’s seen the severed-hands bit before—a Mexican drug cartel punishment for someone who got greedy and put his hands where they shouldn’t be. They broke his fingers first to get information, then punished him as a lesson to others, then finished him off.

But the dirt?

What is that about?

Like he got greedy and built Paradise Homes on bad dirt, and certain people are going to lose a lot of money, so they decided to make him accountable?

F*cking Boone, Johnny thinks.



138

Boone starts to go to sleep.

When he stops thrashing, the world gets very still and peaceful, like Mother Ocean has him in her lap, singing him a lullaby, a pulsing hum like the sounds of whales or dolphins. He feels warm, almost cocooned, and he remembers that he has often said that he would like to die in the ocean instead of in a bed with tubes sticking out of him. Many times said in those conversations on the Dawn Patrol that when his time came, he would just swim out until he was exhausted and couldn’t swim anymore and let the ocean take care of the rest. And maybe this is a little sooner than he hoped for, but it’s like getting into a wave, better too early than too late.

Remembers now his mother telling him that she surfed when she was pregnant with him, took him out with her in the gentler waves, dove underwater so he could feel the pulse and pull, he in the water of his mother, she in the water of hers. They say this is where we came from anyway, crawled from brackish waters onto land, and maybe all of living is a quest to go back, not from dust to dust but from salt to salt. The tide comes and goes out and one day it takes us with it, people say they are going up into the sky that’s where heaven is up there with the father but maybe you don’t go up but down not into hell but into the deep belly of your mother, the deep, impossibly deep blue and that would be okay that would be good a world away from air because you are so tired of holding your breath hoping for air a world beyond struggle and hope, a world of perfect silence you’ve had good times and good friends it’s been a good ride on this wave let it go . . .

Except he hears K2 say:

Not yet.



139

Johnny Banzai’s eating shit.

From Steve Harrington, for starters.