“Can't or won't?”
“Both.” She glances through the curtain to see if the bouncer is there.
He isn't.
“Did you know Angela Hart?”
“What do you mean, ‘did’?”
“She's dead,” Boone says. “They threw her off a motel balcony. It'll be on the news tonight.”
“Oh my God.”
“They'll do the same to Tammy,” Boone says. “I'm trying to find her before they do. If you know anything that can help me, you'll be helping her.”
He keeps an eye on the curtain and an eye on her while she tries to make up her mind. Then she says, “I don't want the money. Angela used to watch my kid sometimes when I couldn't find a sitter.”
“What's your kid look like?”
“What's it to you?”
“It might help.”
“He's-”
“Never mind.”
“All I know about Tammy,” she says, “is that she has a boyfriend.”
“Who?”
“His name is Mick,” Amber says. “He hangs out here a lot.”
“Does Mick have a last name?”
“Penner?”
“Are you asking me or telling me?”
“I'm pretty sure,” Amber says.
Boone asks, “Has he been in today?”
“I haven't seen him in a while,” Amber says; then she looks over Boone's shoulder.
Boone turns and recognizes Tweety.
He's a PB local, hanging around the gym, the GNC store, the bars. Tweety is a juiced-up roid freak with a head even bigger than his huge body. Big flat face with small blue eyes. And he's gigantic-six-six and large-framed already, and whatever shit he's shooting into himself, it's working. He wears a Gold's Gym muscle shirt on the “if you got it, flaunt it” fashion theory. Gray sweatpants over Doc Martens. Tweety sports short-cropped yellow hair: not blond-bright yellow.
Hence the “Tweety” tag.
“Out,” he says to Boone.
“I didn't kiss her or touch her below the figurative belt,” Boone says.
“Out. Now.”
Boone hands Amber a hundred-dollar bill. “Thanks for nothing, bitch. Way to help your friend.”
“Fuck you, asshole.”
Tweety grabs Boone by the elbow. “You don't understand ‘out’?”
“Yeah, I do,” Boone says. “For example, are you out of the closet yet? Is your skull going to pop out of your skin? Has your dick shrunk out of sight yet? Oh, here's another one: Have you thrown a girl out of a building lately?”
Tweety would be the perfect candidate for the job. He could easily have “pressed” Angela and heaved her off the balcony.
Tweety's face turns red.
Guilt, roid rage, or both? Boone wonders.
“Well, have you,” Boone asks, adding, “Tweety?”
Tweety pops a beautiful right cross, plenty of leverage in the hips, weight balanced and coming forward.
Boone isn't there to take it.
He steps to the left, feels the air whoosh by his nose as the heavy fist comes through, then smashes the blade of his foot down into the side of Tweety's kneecap, which dislocates with a sickening pop. Tweety crashes to the floor, rolls into a fetal position, grabs his knee, and howls in pain.
Boone's not exactly eaten up with sympathy. He reaches down, gets his middle and index fingers into Tweety's nostrils, and pulls, because:
1. There are no weights you can pump to strengthen your nose.
2. Steroids might make your head big, but they don't make your nostrils any stronger.
3. It hurts like crazy.
4. And where the nose goes, the head and neck are bound to follow; however, if they don't, your nose is coming off.
So basically, Boone tries to rip Tweety's nose off his face, presenting him with a choice-suffer rhinoplasty or talk.
“Do you have her?”
“Who?”
“You know who, Tweety,” Boone says. “I'm going to ask you one more time. Do you have Tammy Roddick?”
“No!”
Boone lets him go.
Tweety makes a valiant effort to get up. It works okay on the one leg, but when he tries to put weight on the dislocated knee, it gives out under him and he falls forward onto the floor.
But Boone backs up, just in case.
He's tempted to give Tweety another kick in the knee, but it would probably be bad karma, something Sunny's always talking about since deciding to become a Buddhist. Boone doesn't totally get the whole karma thing, but he decides that kicking a guy in his dislocated knee would probably compel Sunny to chant a few thousand more mantras, another concept he's not totally with.
“You should have a mantra,” Sunny told him.
“I have one,” Boone replied.
“‘Everything tastes better on a tortilla’?” Sunny said. “It's a start.”
Anyway, Boone doesn't kick Tweety in the knee and further decides he should get out of there before the bouncer decides to check out what's happening in the old VIP Room.
But Tweety says, “Daniels? I'll be seeing you again. And when I do-”
Boone comes back and kicks him in the knee.
What Sunny doesn't know…
Boone walks out of the VIP Room.
“That was quick,” Petra says. “Sated?”
“Our absence has been requested,” Boone explains.
“I've been thrown out of better places,” Petra says. She follows him out the door.
36
Dave the Love God looks out at the burgeoning ocean and thinks about George Freeth.
George freaking Freeth.
Freeth was a legend. A god. “The Hawaiian Wonder” was the father of San Diego surfing and the first-ever San Diego lifeguard.
If you don't know about Freeth, Dave thinks, you don't know your own heritage, where you came from. You don't know about Freeth, you can't sit in this lifeguard tower and pretend to know who you even are.
It goes back to Jack London.
At the turn of the last century, London was in Honolulu, trying to surf, and he saw this “brown-skinned god” go flying past him. Turned out it was Freeth, son of an English father and a Hawaiian mother. He taught London to
