The kid doesn't live with Eddie-he lives with his mother in Oahubut Keiki Eddie comes for visits. He was about three years old on one of these visits, when a big swell hit the coast and Keiki Eddie's idiot nanny decided it would be a good idea to take her charge for a walk on La Jolla Cove to see the big waves. (Like he had never seen them on the North Shore, right?) One of the big waves smashed into the jetty and took Keiki Eddie back with it, so the kid was really getting a close-up look at the big mackers.
These things usually end badly. Like, the best news is they find the body.
Call it luck, call it God, call it karma-but Boone Daniels, designed by DNA for just this situation, was also there checking out the big waves, using the long view from La Jolla to scope the best break. He heard a scream, saw the nanny pointing, and spotted Keiki Eddie's head bobbing in the surf. Boone jumped into the next wave, grabbed Keiki Eddie, and kept them both from being smashed into the rocks.
It made the Union-Tribune.
LOCAL SURFER RESCUES CHILD.
Next day, Boone was hanging at home, chilling out from the big wave session he'd done after hauling the kid out of the water, when the doorbell rang. Boone opened the door to see this diminutive guy with red hair, tattoos on every part of his exposed skin except his face.
“Anything you want,” the guy said. “Anything you want in this world.”
“I don't want anything,” Boone said.
Eddie tried to lay cash on him, dope on him; Eddie wanted to buy him a freaking house, a boat. Boone finally settled for dinner at the Marine Room. Eddie offered to buy him the Marine Room.
“I don't see myself in the restaurant business,” Boone said.
“What do you see yourself in?” Eddie asked. “You want in my business, brah, speak the word, I'll set you up.”
“I play for the other team,” Boone said, not meaning that he was a lesbian all-female outrigger canoe paddler, but a freaking police officer.
Not that it got in the way of their friendship. Boone wasn't on the narc squad and he didn't make judgments. He had done a little herb in his grom past, and even though he'd grown out of it, he didn't much care what other people did.
So he and Eddie started hanging out a little bit. Eddie became sort of an adjunct member of The Dawn Patrol, although he didn't turn up too often because dawn for Eddie is about one p.m. But he did come around, got to know Dave and Tide, Hang, Sunny and even Johnny, who kept a little distance, due to the potentially adversarial nature of their professions.
Boone, Dave, and Tide would go over to Eddie's house and watch MMA matches on his flat-screen plasma. Eddie's really big into the mixed martial arts, which sprang up in Hawaii anyway, and sponsors his team of fighters, named, unsurprisingly enough, Team Eddie. So they'd hang and watch the fights, or go in Eddie's entourage to the live shows in Anaheim, and Eddie even got Boone to voyage as far away from the ocean as Las Vegas to catch some fights with him and Dave.
And most of The Dawn Patrol was present at Eddie's notorious housewarming party in La Jolla.
Eddie's sprawling modernist mansion occupies an acre on a bluff overlooking the ocean at Bird Rock. The neighbors were, like, appalled, what with the moke guys coming and going, and the parties, and the pounding music, the sounds from Eddie's skateboard tube (Eddie has been known to board off the roof of his house into the barrel), his skeet-shooting range, and his racing up and down the street on his mountain bike while screened by a squadron of heavily armed bodyguards. So the pink polo shirt, yellow golf trouser set that live around Eddie was seriously geeked by him, but what were they going to do about it?
Nothing, that's what.
Nada.
They weren't going over there to complain about the noise; they weren't going to call the police; they weren't going to go to the zoning board with questions about whether a skeet-shooting range or private skateboard park were even allowed in their heretofore quiet neighborhood.
They weren't going to do any of these things, because the neighbors were scared shitless of Red Eddie.
Eddie felt bad about this and tried to alleviate their anxieties by inviting the whole neighborhood over for a luau one Sunday afternoon.
Of course, it turned into a shipwreck.
And one of the first people Eddie invited aboard the Titanic was Boone.
“You gotta come,” Eddie said into the phone after he'd explained the purpose behind the invitation. “Moral support. Bring your whole hui, the ohana. ”
By which he meant The Dawn Patrol.
Boone was reluctant, to say the least. It doesn't take a weather vane to know which way the wind blows, and it didn't take a Savonarola to predict how this little Sunday afternoon gathering was going to turn out. But misery does love company, so Boone brought the subject up at the very next meeting of The Dawn Patrol and was surprised when most of them actually expressed enthusiasm about going.
“You're kidding, right?” Boone asked.
“I wouldn't miss this circus for the world,” Johnny Banzai said.
Yeah, well, circus was about right.
The hula dancers were fine, the ukulele, slack-key guitar, and surf-reggae combo was interesting, if somewhat esoteric, and the sumo wrestlers were, well, sumo wrestlers. High Tide, a late entry, nevertheless took the bronze, while Cheerful wondered aloud just what the hell fat men in diapers were doing bumping bellies in a circle of sand.
So far so good, Boone thought. It could be a lot worse.
But maybe it was when Eddie-blissed-out on a buffet of ecstasy, Maui Wowie, Vicodin, rum colas, and the sheer joy of neighborlinessdemonstrated his walking-over-hot-coals meditation technique and insisted that some of his guests share in the transcendental experience that things got seriously weird.
After the EMTs left, Eddie persuaded the surviving guests to lie down side by side between two ramps and then knieveled them on his mountain bike, after which he released his psychotic rottweiler, Dahmer, from its cage and went mano-a-pawo with it, the two of them rolling around on the patio-blood, saliva, fur, and flesh flying until Eddie finally pinned the dog in a rear-naked chokehold and made it bark uncle.
As the guests offered some weak, somewhat stunned applause, Eddie- sweating, bleeding, huffing, but flushed with victory-muttered to Boone, “Jesus, these haoles are hard to entertain. I'm busting a hump, bruddah. ”
“I dunno,” Boone said, “I guess some people just don't have an appreciation for the finer points of human- canine combat.”
Eddie shrugged, like, Go figure. He leaned over and scratched Dahmer's chest. The dog, panting, bleeding, huffing, and embarrassed by defeat, nevertheless looked up at Eddie with unabashed adoration.
“So what should I do now?” Eddie asked Boone.
“Maybe just chill,” Sunny suggested. “Dial it down a little, let people enjoy their food. The food is great, Eddie.”
Sunny looks great, Boone thought, with her long flower-print sarong, a flower in her hair, and a dot of barbecue sauce on her upper left lip.
“I had it flown in,” Eddie said.
Yes, he had, Boone thought. Mounds of poi, huge platters of fresh ono and opah, pulled pork, chili rice, grilled Spam, and several pigs, the baking pits for which had been dug out of Eddie's back lawn with backhoes.
“Maybe it's time for the tattoo artist,” Eddie said.
“Maybe not so much,” Sunny said.
“Fire-eater?” Eddie asked.
“There you go,” Boone said. He looked at Sunny raising her eyebrow. “What? Everyone likes a fire- eater.”
Well, maybe not everybody. Maybe not a La Jolla crowd whose usual entertainment tended more toward chamber orchestras playing in museum foyers, cocktail-bar pianists warbling Cole Porter tunes, or investment-fund managers pointing toward every upward-climbing diagonal line.
The La Jollans stared at the performer-who was clad only in ankle-to-neck tattoos and something resembling
