The Gentlemen's Hour

A lot of people have drowned, he thinks, trying to save a drowning swimmer. And this one isn’t even worthy of saving. Let him go.

Petra doesn’t. “Your father retained us to—”

Which seems to spark a small flame, anyway. “Hey,” Corey says, “you want to make my dad happy so he pays your bill, knock yourselves out. It has nothing to do with me.”

“It has everything to do with—”

“No,” Corey says. “Trust me—it doesn’t.”

He gets up.

“Sit down,” Boone says.

“You gonna make me?”

“Maybe.”

Corey sighs again but he sits down and stares at the floor.

“Tell me about the Rockpile Crew,” Boone says.

“Nothing to say,” Corey says. Except he goes ahead and says it. “We surf, we party, we brawl. S’bout it.”

Kid sounds like a bad hip-hop lyric, Boone thinks. “You deal?”

“Nah.”

“What about the juice?”

“Say again?”

“Don’t jack me around, I’m not in the mood,” Boone says. “The steroids—you sell, or you just use?”

“I just use,” Corey says.

“Where do you get them?”

“I have nothing to say.” Corey smiles. He looks up from the floor and smiles at Petra. “ ‘Life without parole?’ Do I look like some taco to you? I’ll get probation, the money my dad’s paying.”

He gets up and the guard leads him out.

21

“I have nothing to say,” Boone says out in the parking lot.

“Funny,” Petra says. “Very droll.”

It’s freaking hot out there. The sun is doing its hammer-on-anvil routine and just pounding.

Even Petra is sweating—check that—perspiring.

“No, I can see why you’re eaten up with sympathy for the kid,” Boone says. “It’s his warmth, humility, intelligence, his sense of true remorse for what he did.”

“Come on, Boone,” she says, “you can see through the bluster. He’s a child, he doesn’t know how to react. The vacillation between depressed fatalism and unreasonable optimism is quite telling. The arrogance is covering up fear, the seeming indifference is to mask shame.”

“See,” Boone says, “I think that underneath all that surface arrogance is a deep arrogance, and the sham indifference masks a genuine indifference.”

She unlocks her car and slides into the driver’s seat. “In any case, it’s our job to defend him.”

“He made that point, yeah.”

Because he ain’t some “taco,” a Mexican who would have to pay bust-out retail for what he did. No, Corey’s pretty sure that his white skin and his daddy’s money are going to get him a good deal.

It’s a reasonable assumption, but it’s wrong. This time the community is outraged and demanding action; the very privilege that Corey’s banking on is going to boomerang on him, and he just doesn’t get it yet.

He thinks it’s business as usual, but it isn’t.

There’s another factor here, Boone thinks, feeling old. It’s the video-game generation—they always think they can hit the reset button and get a new game. If nothing is real, if it’s all virtual, then there are no real consequences.

“How did you know about the steroids?” Petra asks.

“I looked at him,” Boone says. “He’s juiced—his muscles are too big for his bones, the shaved hair is thinning. I think he might have been juiced up that night.”

“’Roid rage?”

“Maybe.”

“I’m not sure it’s a viable defense anyway,” she says. “But it’s worth looking into. Where else do you want to take it?”

Boone starts off with where he can’t take it. He can’t talk to Trevor Bodin or the Knowles brothers because their lawyers know that their interests conflict with Corey’s and won’t let the interviews happen. Those kids, smarter than Corey, started making their deals right in the police interview rooms. The best they can hope for is that Alan takes a chunk or two off the rest of the crew’s credibility during cross-exam, but that’s about it. So that’s no good. But he can run down more info on the Rockpile Crew and the “gang” issue, find out what they were all about.

Boone sums all that up for Petra, and then says, “If Corey takes that attitude into a trial, Mary Lou will ride it to a max sentence.”

“I’m sure,” Petra says. “Find out about him, Boone. Open him up for us, get us something we can use.”

“I’m not a shrink, Pete,” Boone says. “Neither are you.”

She just doesn’t get that Corey Blasingame is exactly what he seems to be—a rich, spoiled, uncaring piece of crap who threw an unlucky punch and is going to ride that wave all the way to the bottom because he’s too stupid and arrogant to even try to bail. No, Corey’s in the impact zone and no one’s coming in with a Jet Ski to pull him out.

Yeah, except Kelly Kuhio is pushing Boone onto the ski.

“Just get us the information,” she says. “We’ll figure out what to do with it.”

“You got it.”

Not a fun job, but then again, most of them aren’t.

Why they call it “work.”

And the work of this case will be not so much to find out what Corey did, but why.

“You, uhhh, doing anything tonight?” asks Boone.

Smooth, he thinks, very smooth.

Barney.

She frowns. “Getting together with some people from the office. A retirement celebration for one of the partners. Sort of optional mandatory. Sorry.”

“No worries.” Optional mandatory?

“Another time?”

“Sure.”

She blows him a kiss, closes the door, and pulls out.

Boone gets back into the Deuce.

She probably does have an office thing tonight, he thinks. Or she’s free, but doesn’t want you to think that you can ask her out on short notice like that. He makes a mental note to consult on this with Dave (not for nothing known as) the Love God, then remembers that Dave has asked women out—or more accurately in—with less than thirty seconds’ notice.

The lawyer world, he decides, is very different from the surfer world.

Different waves, different rules.

Speaking of which, he decides to use what’s left of the afternoon by driving up to La Jolla to check out the break known as Rockpile.