The Gentlemen's Hour (Boone Daniels #2)

“You just stumble onto this?” he asks Johnny. “Decided you’d take a ride over to a perp’s father’s house and . . . bingo-bango! ‘Look, Ma, no hands’?”


“I had a lead,” Johnny admits.

“Partners?” Harrington asks. “We’re ‘partners,’ remember? You ever seen any movies? Cop shows on TV? We’re closer than brothers . . . than married couples. Starsky and Hutch? Any of this ring a bell?”

The ME is doing his thing on Blasingame’s body. A rookie uniform is puking into a white plastic bag. Johnny wants to get the hell out of there, not because of the puke or catching shit from Harrington, but to get to Boone and tell him a Mexican drug cartel might be looking for him.

Just because he hates the guy doesn’t mean he wants him tortured to death.

Johnny really wants to get out of there when Lieutenant Romero arrives, takes one look at the scene, and pulls him out on the street.

“Tell me you’re deaf,” Romero says.

“Lieutenant—”

“Because you must not have heard me say, ‘You do not go anywhere near Bill Blasingame.’ Or did you hear me say, ‘You do not go anywhere near Bill Blasingame,’ and interpret it to mean, ‘You do go near Bill Blasingame.’ Which is it?”

Johnny ignores what he assumes to be a rhetorical question and, seeing how his career is swirling around the toilet anyway, says, “It looks like Mexican drug stuff to me. The severed hands, the—”

“Why do my people,” Romero asks, “catch the blame for every nasty, violent, sick activity that happens in this city? A guy gets his hands sliced off and you just assume the beaners did it?”

“I said, it looks like—”

Romero gets right up in his face and says with a hiss, “I told you to stay away from this. I told you to keep some distance so we could duck and cover, and you put me right into it. You want my job, Kodani, is that it? I swear, I’ll take you right down with me.”

“I already figured that, sir.”

“Yeah, you’re a smart bastard, aren’t you?” Romero asks. “See how smart you feel checking up on paroled pedophiles the rest of your career.”

“Am I off this case, Lieutenant?”

“You’re f*cking right. Get out of here.”

Johnny gets in his car and heads for Boone’s.



140

Boone comes to on the deck of the boat.

Water gushes out of his mouth, and he takes a deep breath of air.

Someone says quietly, “Did you think you had died?”

Boone nods.

“You’re going to wish you had,” Jones says.



141

On the way to Boone’s place, Johnny hits him on the cell a few times, but the a*shole doesn’t answer.

Classic Boone anyway—he goes into his crib-slash-cave and forgets the rest of the world exists, doesn’t answer his phone. Johnny just drives over to Crystal Pier. The Deuce is there, so Johnny goes to the door and knocks. Boone doesn’t answer. Johnny walks around and bangs on the windows.

No Boone.

Johnny calls Dave.

“You seen Boone around?”

“Man, I haven’t seen Boone in a long time.”

“I hear that,” Johnny says. “But do you know where he might be?”

“Try the Brit’s place.”

Johnny heads over to Petra’s.



142

Boone bounces on the bottom of the boat like a gaffed fish.

Exhausted and scared, he forces himself to think. First try to gauge the boat’s speed and direction. It’s moving fast for its size, maybe twenty . . . as for direction, it’s beating upwind, and the last he remembers, the wind was coming out of the south. Which scares him worse. If they’re headed south, for Mexico, that’s a one-way trip. If it’s somewhere north of the border, he still has a slim chance.

He keeps time by counting the seconds in his head, and then multiplying by the estimated speed. Shivering from his enforced dives, he tries to force himself to relax and concentrate. The constant monologue from what he’s come to call the Voice doesn’t help.

“Let me tell you what you’re thinking,” the Voice says. “You are thinking that you know something that we want to know, and as long as you don’t give us that information, we have no choice but to keep you alive. That is correct thinking, as far as it goes. As soon as you tell us what we want to know, your usefulness to us ends and we will kill you.

“But here is the flaw in that thinking: it makes the assumption that life is a desirable state of being. I grant you, that assumption is valid—the instinct to survive, the inability to imagine the state of nonexistence, is common to all sensate species—except in the most extraordinary of circumstances. But you are about to experience the most extraordinary of circumstances. That is, a state of being in which life is an intolerable burden, and your one wish will be for it to cease. When that condition is reached, as it will be, you will no longer wish to withhold your precious information. Rather, you will seek to release it, as in its release you will find your own.

“The only question for us now is, do you believe me when I tell you this, or will you force me to prove it to you? In the interest of fairness I should perhaps tell you that I derive no small amount of pleasure—both intellectual and sensual—from reducing beings to a state where they no longer wish to exist.

“Interestingly, we shall each occupy a counterintuitive position at polar opposites: You will yearn for death instead of life. I will hope that you prolong your life as your suffering prolongs my pleasure.

“And you do present a particular challenge—most men, when faced with drowning, quickly beg to tell what we wish to know. You, on the other hand, seem quite adapted to a state that reduces other subjects to abject panic. Clearly, water is not a reductive element for you, so we must turn to other things. I assure you, there is no shortage of options, and I am keen to try them all.

“But in the interest of professionalism, as I have been retained to procure this information from you, I put it to you now—will you tell me what I want to know? Gentleman to gentleman: Where are the records?”

Petra has them, Boone thinks. I left them with Petra. He says, “What records?”

“Oh, good,” says the Voice. “I was so hoping for that answer.”

Boone hears the engine throttle down, and feels the boat slow as it turns port, toward land. A few minutes later, he feels it bump into something solid and then the scrape of metal against wood.

We haven’t gone nearly far enough, he thinks, to be in Mexico.

They lift him out of the boat and start dragging him along the dock—he can feel the slightly swaying wood under his feet—then up a slope.

Boone feels a hand above each of his elbows, but they have a loose grip, as if confident that he’s been totally cowed. A reasonable assumption, he thinks, seeing as how his wrists are taped behind him and his ankles are taped together.

He asks, “Where are we going?”

“To a place,” the Voice says, “of serene quiet and exquisite pain.”

Boone gauges the angle and distance of the Voice, then jerks up out of the grasp at his elbows and throws his body as horizontally as he can get into the air, bends his knees, and then kicks out. He feels his feet make contact and hears the Voice grunt, “Ooof” before there’s the sound of something heavy hitting the dock. Then he hears the Voice scream, “My knee! My knee!”

Boone tucks his chin into his chest as they start beating him.

Gun butts, boots, and fists—but on the shoulders, the ribs, the legs, not in the head. They don’t want to kill him and they don’t want him to lose consciousness, so he lies there and focuses on the Voice’s whimpers.

“Get him in the van,” the Voice says eventually.

He hears a van door slide open and they lift him up and push him inside. The door closes.



143

Petra sits on her living-room floor with her laptop set between her splayed legs, a mug of tea at her right hand, and does what she knows best how to do.