It took Johnny a while to settle Harrington down. You put Boone Daniels in front of Harrington, it's the proverbial red cape before a bull. The lieutenant wanted to know just what the fuck Boone was doing there, and, truth be told, so does Johnny.
For a PI, Boone is a shitty liar, and besides, he does very little matrimonial work. And no PI in his right mind brings the wife along to see live and in color what the husband's been up to. Not to mention the fact that the woman is a real looker who is not likely to be cheated on, and that she wasn't wearing a wedding ring.
So Boone's story is bullshit totale, and one of the very next things that Johnny is going to do is track Boone down and find out what he was doing at a motel where a woman played Rocky the Flying Squirrel with tragic results.
Now, Johnny Banzai and Boone Daniels are boys.
They go way back together, all the way to fifth grade, where they would drop their pencils at the same time so they could duck under their desks together, look at Miss Oliveira's legs, and giggle.
That was before Johnny got into the soft-core porn business.
What Johnny would do was buy back issues of Playboy from an older cousin, cut out the pictures, and slip them into the lining of his three-ring binder, which he had carefully sliced and covered over for the purpose. Then he'd sell them in the boys' room for fifty cents to a dollar each.
Johnny was doing a brisk trade in the boys' room one day when some ninth graders came in and decided to take him off. Boone came in like “Here I am to save the day,” the surfer dude ready to rescue his little yellow brother, except that Johnny didn't exactly need rescuing.
Boone had heard the word judo before, but he had never seen judo, and now he watched in sheer awe as Johnny literally wiped the floor with one of his attackers, while a second sat against the wall trying to remember his name, and the third just stood there rethinking the whole idea.
Boone punched him in the stomach, just to help the thought process along a little bit.
That was it — he and Johnny had been friends before, but now they were friends. And when Johnny took his porn money down to Pacific Surf and bought a board with it, they were locked in. They've been buddies ever since, and when all the shit went down with Boone, Johnny was the only cop who stood by him. Johnny would kill for Boone and knows that Boone would do the same for him.
But They inhabit roughly the same professional sphere, and there are times when the Venn diagram intersects. Usually when this happens they're on the same side-they cooperate, share information. They've even done stakeouts together. But there are other times when they find themselves on opposite sides of a case.
Which is a problem that could fuck up a friendship. Except, being friends, they work it through what they call “the jump-in rule.”
The jump-in rule states the following:
If Johnny and Boone find themselves on the same wave-following the metaphor, it's just like when someone jumps in on your wave-it's on. You do what you have to do and it's nothing personal. Johnny and Boone will go at it like the sheepdog and the coyote in those old cartoons, and, at the end of the day, when they punch out, they'll still meet at the beach, grill some fish together, and watch the sunset.
It's the jump-in rule, and if one guy asks a question the other guy can't answer, or asks the other guy to do something he can't do, all the other guy has to say is “jump-in rule,” and enough said.
Game on.
This is what Johnny plans to say when he finds Boone-ask him some very pointed questions, and if Boone doesn't have some very good answers, then Johnny's going to arrest his ass for impeding an investigation. Doesn't want to do it, won't like doing it, but he will do it and Boone will understand. Then Johnny will go in and spring for bail money.
Because Johnny has a thing about loyalty.
Of course he does. If you're Japanese and you grew up anywhere in California, you have a thing about loyalty.
Johnny's too young to remember it-Johnny was a long way from even having been born-when the U.S. government accused his grandparents of disloyalty and hauled them off to a camp in the Arizona desert for the duration of the war.
He's heard the stories, though. He knows the history. Hell, the cop shop that he works out of is just blocks away from what used to be “Little Japan,” down on Fifth and Island, on the south edge of the Gaslamp District.
San Diego's Nikkei community had been in the area since the turn of the century, first as immigrant farmworkers, or tuna fishermen down in Point Loma. They'd worked their asses off so that the next generation could buy land in Mission Valley and up in North County near Oceanside, where they became small, independent farmers. Hell, Johnny's maternal grandfather still grows strawberries up east of O'side, stubbornly hanging in there against the dual enemies of age and urban development.
Johnny's paternal grandfather moved into Little Japan and opened up a bath and barber shop, where the Japanese men came in to get their hair cut and then take long hot baths in the steaming furo down in the basement.
Johnny's father has walked him through the old neighborhood, pointing out the buildings that still survived, showing him where Hagusi's grocery store was, where the Tobishas had their restaurant, where old Mrs. Kanagawa kept her flower shop.
It was a thriving community, mixed in with the Filipinos and the few Chinese who stayed after the city tore down Chinatown, and the blacks and the whites, and it was a nice place to be and to grow up.
Then Pearl Harbor happened.
Johnny's father heard it on the radio. He was seven years old then, and he ran to the barbershop to tell his father. By the next morning, the FBI had rounded up the president of the Japanese Association, the faculty of the Japanese School, the Buddhist priests, and the judo and kendo instructors and thrown them in a cell with the common criminals.
Within a week, the fishermen, the vegetable growers, and the strawberry farmers had been arrested. Johnny's father still remembers standing on a sidewalk downtown and watching as they were marched-in handcuffs-from one jail to another. He remembers his father telling him not to look, because these men-leaders of their community-were looking down at the ground in their humiliation and their shame.
Two months later, the entire Nikkei community was forced out of its homes and taken by train to the racetrack at Santa Anita, where they stayed for almost a year behind wire before being moved to the internment camp in Poston, Arizona. When they returned to San Diego after the war, they found that many of their homes, businesses, and farms had been taken over by whites. Some of the Nikkei left; others yielded to reality and started over; some-like Johnny's maternal grandfather-began the long and tortuous legal process to recover their property.
But Little Japan was no more, and the once-tight Nikkei community scattered all over the county. Johnny's father went to college, on to medical school, and then set up a successful practice in Pacific Beach.
He always thought his son would join the practice and take it over, but Johnny had other ideas. Young Johnny was always a little different from his siblings-while he dutifully fulfilled the stereotype of the diligent Asian student, Johnny preferred action to academics. He got through the school day to get to the baseball field, where he was an All-City second baseman. When he wasn't on the diamond, he was in the water, a hard-charging grom ripping waves. Or he was in the dojo, learning judo from the older Japanese men, Johnny's one real bow to his heritage.
When it came time for Johnny to choose a career path, he had the grades to go premed but went prelaw instead. When it came time to go to law school, Johnny checked out of that wave. He dreaded more hours at the library, more days behind a desk. What he craved was action, so he took the police exam and shredded it.
When Johnny told his father about his decision to become a cop, his father thought about the police who had led his own father in handcuffs through the streets of downtown San Diego, but he said nothing. Heritage, he thought, should be a foundation, not an anchor. Johnny didn't become a doctor, but he married one, and that helped to ease the sting. The important thing was that Johnny become a success in his chosen field, and Johnny rocketed through the uniformed ranks to became a very good detective indeed.
His connections to the Japanese community, though, are tenuous. He retains enough Japanese to be an annoyance in a sushi bar, he goes to the Buddhist temple with less and less frequency, and he's even missed one or
