what he did with the girl. No bruises, no marks, no nothing.”
“You can't just torture a man.”
“Maybe you can't,” Harrington said. “I can. Watch me.”
“Jesus, Steve.”
“Jesus nothing, Boone,” Harrington said. “What if the girl is still alive? What if the sick fuck has her buried somewhere and the air is running out? You really want to wait to go through ‘the process,’ Boone? I don't think the kid has the time for your moral scruples. Now get in the fucking car; we're going to the beach.”
Boone got in.
Sat there in silence while Harrington headed the car toward Ocean Beach and started in on Rasmussen. “You want to save yourself some pain, short eyes, you'll tell us right now what you did with that little girl.”
“I don't know what you're talking about.”
“Keep it up,” Harrington said. “Go ahead, make us madder.”
“I don't know anything about any little girl,” Rasmussen said. Boone turned to look at him. The man was terrified-sweating, his eyes popping out of his head.
“You know what we have in mind for you?” Harrington asked, peeking into the rearview mirror. “You know what it's like to drown? When we pull you out after a couple of minutes breathing water, you'll be begging to tell us. What did you do with her? Is she alive? Did you kill her?”
“I don't know-”
“Okay,” Harrington said, pushing down on the gas pedal. “We're going to the submarine races!”
Rasmussen started to shake. His knees knocked together involuntarily.
“You piss your pants in my cruiser,” Harrington told him, “I'm going to get really mad, Russ. I'm going to hurt you even worse.”
Rasmussen started screaming and kicking his feet against the door.
Harrington laughed. It didn't matter-Rasmussen wasn't going anywhere and nobody was going to hear him. After a couple of minutes, he stopped screaming, sat back in the seat, and just whimpered.
Boone felt like he was going to throw up.
“Easy, surfer boy,” Harrington said.
“This isn't right.”
“There's a kid involved,” Harrington said. “Suck it up.”
It didn't take long to get to Ocean Beach. Harrington pulled the car over by the pier, turned around, looked at Rasmussen, and said, “Last chance.”
Rasmussen shook his head.
“All right,” Harrington said. He opened the car door and started to get out.
Boone reached for the radio. “Unit 9152. We have suspect Russell Rasmussen. We're coming in.”
“You cunt,” Harrington said. “You weak fucking cunt.”
Rasmussen never told what he did with the girl.
The SDPD held him for as long as they could, but without evidence they couldn't do anything and had to kick him. Every cop on the force looked for the girl's body for weeks, but they finally gave up.
Rasmussen, he went off the radar.
And life got bad for Boone.
He became a pariah on the force.
Harrington moved to Detective Division, and it was hard to find another uniform who wanted to ride with Boone Daniels. The ones who would were bottom-of-the-barrel types, cops whom other cops didn't want to ride with-the drunks, the losers, the guys with one foot out the door anyway-and none of the pairings lasted longer than a couple of weeks.
When Boone would call for backup, the other cops would be a little slow in responding; when he went into the locker room, no one spoke to him and backs were turned; when he'd go to leave, he'd pick up mumbled comments-“weak unit,” “child killer,” “traitor.”
He had one friend on the force-Johnny Banzai.
“You shouldn't be seen with me,” Boone told him one day. “I'm poison.”
“Knock off the self-pity,” Johnny told him.
“Seriously,” Boone said. “They won't like you being friends with me.”
“I don't give a shit what they like,” Johnny said. “My friends are my friends.”
And that was that.
One day, Boone was leaving the locker room when he heard a cop named Kocera mutter, “Fucking pussy.”
Boone came back in, grabbed him, and put his brother cop into a wall. Punches were thrown, and Boone ended up with a month's unpaid suspension and mandatory appointments with a department counselor who talked to him about anger management.
The subject of Rain Sweeny didn't come up.
Boone spent most of the month on Sunny's couch.
He'd get up by eleven in the morning, drain a couple of beers, and lie there watching television, looking out the window, or just sleeping. It drove Sunny nuts. This was a Boone she'd never seen-passive, morose, angry.
One day when she gently suggested that he might want to go out for a surf session, he replied, “Don't handle me, okay, Sunny? I don't need handling. ”
“I wasn't handling you.”
“Fuck.”
He got up off the couch and went back to bed.
She was hoping things would get better when he went back to work.
They didn't. They got worse.
The department took him off the street altogether and put him behind a desk, filing arrest reports. It was a prescription to drive an active, outdoor man crazy, and it did the trick. Eight to five, five days a week, he sat alone in a cubicle, entering data. He'd come home bored, edgy, and angry.
He was miserable.
“Quit,” Dave the Love God told him.
“I'm not a quitter,” Boone replied.
But three months into this bullshit, he did quit. Pulled his papers, turned in his badge and gun, and walked away. No one tried to talk him out of it. The only word he heard was from Harrington, who literally opened the door for him on the way out.
The word was “Good.”
Two hours later, Boone was back on Sunny's couch.
Surfing was out. Boone went AWOL from The Dawn Patrol. He never showed up anymore. He didn't go out at all.
One night, Sunny came home from a long shift at The Sundowner, found him stretched out on the sofa in the sweatpants and T-shirt that he'd had on for a week, and said, “We have to talk about this.”
“Which really means you have to talk about this.”
“You're clinically depressed.”
“‘Clinically depressed’?” Boone asked. “You're a shrink now?”
“I talked to one.”
“Fuck, Sunny.”
It got him off the couch anyway. He went out to her little porch and plopped down on one of the folding beach chairs. She followed him out there.
“I know you're angry,” she said. “I don't blame you.”
“I do.”
“What?”
“I do,” Boone repeated, staring out toward the ocean. She could see tears running down his face as he said, “I should have done what Harrington said. I should have helped him hold that guy under the water… beat him… hurt him… whatever it took to make him give up what he did with Rain Sweeny. I was wrong, and that girl is dead because of me.”
