“No, I'm serious.”
“So am I,” Boone says. “Get out.”
She digs in. “I'm coming with you.”
“No, you're not,” Boone says.
“Why not?”
He doesn't have a good answer for this. She is the client, after all, and it's not like finding some wayward stripper is exactly dangerous. The best he can come up with is, “Look, just get out, okay?”
“You can't make me,” Petra says.
Boone has the feeling that she's uttered these words many times, and that she's usually been right. He glares at her.
“I have pepper spray in my bag,” she says.
“You don't need pepper spray, Pete,” says Boone. “Some dude attacks you? Just talk at him for a minute and he'll take him selfout.”
“Perhaps we should take my car,” Petra says.
“Let me ask you something, Pete,” says Boone. “Do you have a boyfriend?”
“I don't see how that is-”
“Just answer the question,” Boone says.
“I'm seeing someone, yes.”
“Is he, like, miserable?”
Petra's a little surprised that this remark actually hurts her feelings. Boone sees the little flinch in her eyes and the slight flush of color on her cheeks, and he's as surprised as she is that she's capable of hurt.
He feels a little bad about it.
“I'll try one more time,” he says; “then we'll take your car.”
He cranks the key again and this time the engine starts. It's not happy-it coughs, gags, and sputters-but it starts.
“You should have your mechanic check the gaskets,” Petra says as Boone pulls out onto Garnet Avenue.
“Petra?”
“Yes?”
“ Pleaseshut up.”
“Where are we going?” Petra asks.
“The Triple A cab office.”
“Why?”
“Because Roddick now dances at TNG, and that's the cab service the TNG girls always use,” Boone replies.
“How do you know?”
Boone says, “It's the sort of specialized local knowledge you're paying the big bucks for.”
He doesn't bother to explain to her that most bars-strip clubs included-have arrangements with certain cab companies. When tourists ask a Triple A driver to take them to a strip club, he'll take them to TNG. In exchange, whenever the bartender or bouncer at TNG has to call a cab for a customer who might otherwise be charged with DUI, he returns the courtesy. So if Tammy Roddick called a taxi to pick her up at her place, she probably called Triple A.
“How do you know she didn't have a friend pick her up?” Petra asks. “Or that she didn't just walk?”
“I don't,” Boone replies. “It just gives me a place to start.”
Even though he doesn't think that Roddick took a cab anywhere. What he thinks is that Silver, or some of his muscle, or all of the above came and took her on a long trip to somewhere.
And that they'll never find Tammy Roddick.
But he has to try.
When you get on a wave, you ride the wave.
All the way to the end, if it lets you.
He drives through Pacific Beach.
17
Pacific Beach.PB.
The old beach town sits just a few miles northwest of downtown San Diego, just across Mission Bay from the airport. The marshlands that used to separate it from the city were drained, and now the old swamp is the site of SeaWorld, where thousands of people come to see Shamu.
On the coastline itself, running south to north, you have the great playground stretch of Ocean Beach, Mission Beach, and Pacific Beach-OB, MB, and PB to locals, people too busy to speak in entire words, or to readers of windshield decals. Ocean Beach is cut off from the other two by the Mission Bay Channel, but Mission Beach runs seamlessly into Pacific Beach, the only division being the arbitrary border of Pacific Beach Drive at the head of Mission Bay.
Pacific Beach started as a college town.
Back in 1887, the real estate speculators who had bought the barren stretch of dirt, then a long carriage ride from the city, were trying to figure out how to attract people and came up with the idea of higher education, so they built the San Diego College of Letters. This was during the great boom of the late 1880s, when the railroads were offering six-dollar fares from Nebraska, Minnesota, and Wisconsin and midwesterners flocked to San Diego to play real estate hot potato.
Things did boom in Pacific Beach for the first couple of years. The railroad stretched from downtown, so the city dwellers could come out to the beach to play, and new pilgrims lived in tents on the beach while their gingerbread cottages were being built on lots, some of which doubled in value between morning and noon. A weekly newspaper came into being, largely funded by real estate ads. The American Driving Park was built alongside the beach, where The Sundowner and Boone's office now sit, and Wyatt Earp, on the run from an Arizona murder indictment, came out to race his horses.
It was all good for about a year; then the boom went bust. In a single day, lots that had been worth hundreds were finding no buyers at twenty-five dollars, the San Diego College of Letters shut its doors, and the American Driving Park slowly yielded to the salt air, the hot sun, and sad abandonment.
Wyatt Earp left for Los Angeles.
A few committed hangers-on kept their lots and built cottages, a few of which still cling to life among the hotels and condo complexes that line Ocean Boulevard like fortresses. But for the most part, Pacific Beach slid into decline.
Well, as the trite saying goes, When God hands you lemons…
Plant lemon trees.
Left with little but dirt and sun, the developers of Pacific Beach used them both to plant lemon trees, and around the turn of the century, the community proclaimed itself “the Lemon Capital of the World.” It worked for a while. The flats now occupied by rows of houses were then rows of citrus trees until cheap steamship rates and relaxed import laws made Sicily the Lemon Capital of the World instead; the lemon trees of Pacific Beach were no longer worth the water it took to irrigate them, and the community was back to a search for an identity.
Earl Taylor gave it one. Earl came out from Kansas in 1923 and started buying up land. He built the old Dunaway Drugstore, now the on the corner of Cass and Garnet, a block east of Boone's current office, and then put up a number of other businesses.
Then he met Earnest Pickering, and the two of them conspired to build Pickering's Pleasure Pier.
Yeah, Pleasure Pier.
Right at the end of present-day Garnet Avenue, the pier jutted out into the ocean, and this wasn't a pier for docking ships; this was a pier for, well, pleasure. It had a midway with all kinds of carnival games and cheap food treats, and a dance hall, replete with a cork-lined dance floor.
